Review: THE WIND

This is the opposite of the experience I had during last year's 30 nights o' horror. The movie Satanic not only has a goofy title for a horror movie made in 2016 but its promotional art looks like it was done by a child trying to be scary. I took a chance on it expecting only cheap knockoff rubbish so I could fill my quota without overthinking. It turned out to be a strong, well considered movie about youth and bad decision making. The Wind, on the other hand has a powerful image of a prairie woman seen from behind brandishing a shot gun at the doorway of a shaky wooden house, ready to repel the worst. It had reappeared on SBS on Demand after months of absence during which time I considered it lost. Now it's back.

Lizzy and Isaac have gone west in the expansion of the USA in the 19th century and are eking out an austere but effective life on the land. Another couple move in to the nearby abandoned cottage and the two pairs form a workable if tiny community. And then jealousy and hardship take their toll and bad things happen. Bad things have already happened but we learn them after the present bad things as this out of sequence grimoire tries to herd its themes together to form a second timeline motivated by dramatic importance.

The problem is that it gets so convoluted that I had to face the fact that I stopped bothering to unravel it through a lack of empathy with anyone on screen. There are well presented points here and good performances to support them. There's a readiness to step outside genre parameters and reorganise elements for a new kind of horror film. But the horror isn't scary, the tragedy is unaffecting and the players are betrayed by undercooked writing. This, for me, wipes all the impressive production values  off the board, because in the end I stopped caring. In some movies this wouldn't matter: this one depends on empathy which far too soon reduces to a plea for indulgence.

A waste of good atmosphere.

Available on SBS on Demand until November 30