THE WIND (2018)
Label: Umbrella Entertainment
Region Code: 4 (PAL Format)
Rating: M
Duration: 84 Minutes
Audio: English Dolby Digital
Video: Anamorphic Widescreen (2.40:1)
Director: Emma Tammi
Cast: Julia Goldani Telles, Ashley Zukerman, Dylan McTee, Miles Anderson
The Wind (2018) is a western-horror set on the prairie in the 19th century where Lizzy (Caitlin Gerard, Insidious: The Last Key) lives with her hard-toiling husband Isaac (Ashley Zukerman), it's a hard life on the remote frontier, but they make the best of it. we come to see that Lizzy is troubled by the presence of what she believes are demons, though her husband assures her it all a trick of the wind on the prairie. The arrival of an Illinois city-couple Emma (Julia Goldani Telles) and Gideon (Dylan McTee) at a nearby homestead ends their isolation, but having neighbors doesn't exactly improve Lizzy state of mind.
The film is told with a fractured time line and narrative, opening with a scene of Lizzy covered in blood, holding a baby on the front porch of her home, with both Gideon and Isaac standing outside. The child is dead and the corpse of Emma lays inside, with Lizzy having performed an impromptu cesarean on her neighbor's corpse in an effort to save the baby, the woman having apparently committed suicide by shooting herself in the head with Lizzy's shotgun. The child dies soon after and is buried with it's mother on the prairie. in the aftermath Isaac is set to journey back to the city with the grieving Gideon, leaving Lizzy alone on the prairie, her husband telling her to prepare for the coming winter.
The film then settles into a fractured
timeline, moving from the current timeline to past events that examine the arrival of the new couple, the jealousies and betrayals their arrival signals, and examining both women's state of mind, including the possibility of a demonic force that haunts them both while seemingly passing unnoticed by their husbands.
The film has an unreliable narrative told from the perspective of Lizzy, a strong frontierswoman, but someone we come to believe is either plagued by a cracked psyche or demonic forces, maybe even both. It's an eerie film, the American frontier is a gorgeous setting, but also one fraught with hardship, the inherent isolation and incessant prairie winds play with the mind, particularly when one is left on their own, suffering from postpartum depression, assailed by phantoms real or imagined.
Audio/Video: The Wind (2018) arrives on region 4-locked PAL formatted DVD from Umbrella Entertainment framed in anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1). The scope lensed film looks gorgeous, each shot evoking classic westerns films and even a bit of the American Gothic film The Reflecting Skin. I wish Umbrella would have given this one a Blu-ray release, but it looks solid for a DVD, but some of the darker scene are murky and not as finely resolved and crisp as an HD format probably would have afforded it, thankfully for US fans their is a Blu-ray currently available from Scream Factory/IFC Midnight - but which is also seemingly bereft of extras.
Audio comes by way of an English Dolby Digital 5.1 mix with plenty of sweeping winds and whispering demons to keep surrounds active, plus the tense score from Ben Lovett (The Signal) adds a bunch of atmosphere to the film. There are no subtitle options available for this release.
No extras on this one, not even a trailer, not even a start-up menu. The single-disc DVD release comes housed in a standard DVD keepcase with a single-sided sleeve of artwork. I found the text on this one a bit hard to read, the dull grey-ish lettering against the dark earth-tone background really made it a chore to read the small-type synopsis and credits.
The Wind (2018) is a creepy and atmosphere heavy slice of western folk-horror that offers up some cabin-on-the-prairie chills with a Repulsion (1965)-ish cracked narrative that I found completely enthralling from start to finish, this comes highly
recommended for fans of slow-burning folk-horror.
