Director: Emma Tammi

One key to creating a good horror film is isolation. Characters are almost always isolated physically (John Carpenter’s The Thing, Alien), culturally (Hostel), or both (An American Werewolf in London). Emma Tammi’s new film The Wind creates isolation through the setting of the Old West, where your nearest neighbors are often a mile or more away, and there are no cell phones with which to call 911. Reminiscent of recent slow-burn thriller/horror films, such as The Witch and Hereditary, this film, unlike this year’s Midsommar, immediately lets us know that something is off. The film opens with what appears to be a bloody childbirth, an event not unusual for a home birth in the Old West. But all is not what it seems…

An effective, if derivative, score and jumbled timeline play with the idea of what is real and what is only in the mind of our protagonist, Lizzy Macklin (Caitlin Gerard). Lizzy and her husband Isaac (Ashley Zuckerman) seem to be enjoying their lives alone on the prairie when their quietude is disrupted by the arrival of new neighbors Gideon Harper (Dylan McTee) and his wife, Emma (Julia Goldani Telles). Although contact with others is initially welcome, Lizzy quickly suspects that all is not right with the Harpers, and especially with Emma, who slights her husband’s abilities as a frontiersman, pays a little too much attention to Isaac, and is found one night hiding under her bed, insisting that something is coming for her.

The rest of the movie is a series of muddled scenes that, while increasingly disturbing, don’t always feel joined as part of a whole. An outstanding performance by Gerard centers the film and keeps us interested, while the fractured timeline leaves us confused and, like Gerard’s Lizzy, in despair. There is so much of the film that ends up being ambiguous, and although Lizzy could certainly be dubbed an “unreliable narrator,” which would explain the ambiguities, it’s not clear why accessing the film through her viewpoint would give us such an uncertainty of the timing of the film’s events. Still, that may not turn everyone off, but I feel it does detract from the effectiveness of the film.

In the end, the film does have some legitimate scares (and a few cheap ones), but it feels a little empty and not as satisfying as it could have been, especially with Gerard’s acting chops behind it. If you liked any of the films I mentioned earlier, you might give this one a shot. If you like your horror in a hockey mask with knife-gloves, this one will either bore or confuse you, I suspect.

IMDb blows in at 5.5, which is probably a little low for me. I’d go up to a 6.0 on this one, as I didn’t mind the choppy narrative as much as I think others might. (running time 1:26)