Caitlin Gerard
“THE WIND” My rating: C+ (Opens April 5 at the Screenland Tapcade)
86 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“The Wind” is plenty ambitious. It’s part Western, part horror flick, part feminist parable.
Thing is, it doesn’t fully work on any of those levels.
When we first see our heroine, Lizzy (Caitlin Gerard) she is covered head to foot in blood and holding a dead baby. Talk about making an entrance.
We later learn that the blood is that of her best friend and the only other woman living within a day’s walk of the struggling ranch run by Lizzy and her husband Isaac (Ashley Zukerman). Apparently the woman, who was pregnant, developed a killer case of cabin fever and blew out her brains with Lizzy’s shotgun. Out of desperation Lizzy then cut open her friend in an effort to save the child. No luck.
Needless to say, Lizzie is rocked by this desperate act. But things will get worse. Director Emma Tammi and screen writer Teresa Sutherland (adapting Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 novel) will see to that.
Set in the mid-1800s somewhere out West, “The Wind” examines how isolation and wide open spaces work on a woman’s mind. Like Henry James The Turn of the Screw, we can never be sure if the horrors Lizzy must cope with — a pack of ravenous wolves, noises in the night, an eviscerated goat, the certainty that some hideous creature is lurking just outside her door — are real or the products of her tortured psyche.
Our heroine finds some relief with the arrival of another young couple who take up residence in an abandoned cabin not too far away. Lizzy is particularly thrilled to get to know Emma (Julia Golden Telles), a young woman who hardly seems tough enough for this beautiful but challenging environment.
Things get tense when Emma becomes pregnant — Lizzy and Isaac apparently lost their only child a few years before. Emma becomes more remote and, well, crazed.
“This land is funny,” she observes in a moment of lucidity. “It plays tricks on your mind.”
No kidding. Especially there is the wind, which is forever blowing. It’s enough to drive a woman mad.
“The Wind” has been beautifully filmed and evokes a genuine sense of time and place. But despite a solid central performance by Gerard the drama runs out of steam, relying on jarring fiddles and quick cuts for shock effect as Lizzy’s mind starts to slip. It’s fine for what it is…but I wanted more.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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