The Wind

Horror Westerns are incredibly hard to accomplish, and director Emma Tammi’s boldness and imagination makes ‘The Wind’ a spooky breath of fresh air.

• Jake Watt

Read Jake's full article... https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/article/review-the-wind-a-paranoid-western-nightmare

Head to https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/sff for more Sydney Film Festival reviews.

Very well made and genuinely creepy socio-political allegory, although the ambiguity and pacing won't be for everyone

Disbelief is not just about men disbelieving us. It is about our own disbelief in ourselves.

• Amber Tamblyn; "I'm Done With Not Being Believed"; The New York Times (September 16, 2017)

The Wind is ostensibly a horror movie about a woman being terrorised by a demon on the American frontier. However, look a little deeper, and you'll find it may very well be a study of prairie madness. However, look even deeper, and it's really a metaphorical examination of the mindset of a less enlightened time, when women were very much second-class citizens who were expected to tend to the home and do little else. A fiercely feminist appropriation of that most masculine of genres - the western - it deals with traditionally gendered themes such as frontier domesticity and postpartum depression, remaining always within the genre's paradigms, even whilst challenging many of that genre's most fundamental tropes. Although it could be accused of wilfully ignoring the narrative of colonial violence and the fact that American pioneers were land thieves who displaced entire populations and destroyed indigenous cultures, the film is nevertheless an examination of the inherent dangers of attempting to cultivate a vast "uncivilised" land (both psychological and otherwise). Bleak and pared back, it's one of those films whose lack of budget actually works in its favour (there are only six cast members and one location). A slow-burner that relies on shadows and sound effects, it's built on atmosphere, tone, and escalating psychological terror (there's only one jump scare, although it's a damn good one), in the tradition of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's The Blair Witch Project (1999), and more recent similarly staged films such as Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014), Robert Eggers's The VVitch: A New England Folk Tale (2016), Ari Aster's _Heredita...