The Wind – A Movie A Day #88
The Wind – A Movie A Day #88
I recently learned about The Wind from a playthrough of a short video game created as a teaser before the movie came out. Here’s what I saw:
I thought this was a great idea. I mean, I imagine only a fraction of the people who played this saw the movie, and only a fraction of the people who saw the movie know the game even exists, but for those of us who love small, retro-styled indie games AND small, western-horror indie movies, this was the perfect scenario!
I saw the video above only a few weeks ago even though it was posted almost a year ago. After seeing that though, I stumbled upon the movie in my local video store just a few days ago. It was like it was meant to be.
So I’ve played the game and I’ve watched the movie. I’m happy to say I like them both. The game really is just a teaser. There’s not much too it, but the atmosphere is great. Retro-styling might be trendy (and it certainly is), but I think that aesthetic works really well for a movie like this. The simple graphics and mostly empty, black screens evoke a lonely and sparse game world. There’s not much to interact with besides things that want to kill you and the things you need to protect yourself from death. The Wind (the movie) is a western set on a lonely frontier with very few people and wide open fields. The only things the characters really have are what they need to survive, and anything else is a luxury. Like in the game, their existence is spartan and harsh.
I could go on about how surprisingly well the game represents the tone of the movie, but I’ll move on. The movie focuses on a woman, Lizzy, who lives with her husband, Isaac, in a small house on the frontier. There is only one house even remotely close to where they live. Other than that, there are wide open plains and rolling hills as far as the eye can see. The movie starts with Lizzy and Isaac’s only neighbors, a husband and wife, suffering a tragedy. In the aftermath, Lizzy is left home alone for a few days. The rest of the movie follows Lizzy as she tries to protect herself from something (or some force) that exists out on the frontier. As Lizzy deals with daily and nightly visits, the background of the story is filled in through flashbacks where we learn what led up to the tragic beginning of the movie.
While the plot focuses on Lizzy growing increasingly scared and paranoid about whatever mysterious force is outside her house, the movie, metaphorically, is really about a woman’s experience on the frontier. There’s a short video on the DVD where the stars, the director, and the writer talk about what they saw they movie as, and they spoke about wanting to show what it was like for women in these western stories while the men are off doing manly things. I’m paraphrasing of course, but basically they wanted to create the side of the story we rarely get to see. More specifically, I saw it as a female-focused narrative about the loneliness and hardships that come with being transplanted from society to the harsh realities of making a life almost literally from the ground up.
Lizzy is strong and more than capable, but the introduction of her young and inexperienced neighbors threatens to unbalance the life she and her husband have created. Small things can be life or death when living on the frontier, and the movie shows that the balance, whether it’s the physical or mental side of it, is often delicate. For Lizzy, her unbalancing is filtered visually through her thoughts on religion and demons, as well as her own personal tragedies.
So what I’m saying is, you can watch this movie as a huge metaphor for life on the frontier, or you can watch it as a supernatural horror movie. Or both. Any way you watch it, I think The Wind is a good movie. I AM kind of partial to westerns and horror movies, but still, I think it’s worth watching even if you just have a passing interest in those genres.
