Wendigo

If you're expecting a monster movie where dozens of victims are torn apart by a CGI behemoth, forget it. Instead, WENDIGO is a dark tale told mostly from a child's point of view. It's about imagination, mythology, and making sense out of harsh reality.

A boy named Miles (Erik Per Sullivan) is thrust into nightmarish circumstances when a family vacation becomes a deadly ordeal. After enraging a vengeful hunter (John Speredakos), the family becomes the object of his insane wrath. While his parents (Jake Weber and Patricia Clarkson) attempt to deal with the situation with logic and psychology, Miles is introduced to the spiritual world of the Wendigo.

The supernatural aspects of the story could be fact or fiction, the result of an intervening spirit or simply hallucination. To Miles, it's all too real. It's his view that drives the movie...

The story is about a man who along with his wife n son takes a weekend off n head to an isolated house to cut off from the city n work life stress. On the way, the man hits a deer who was running away from some hunters. After being towed n reaching the house, the man notices bullet stuck in the wall n a hole in the window. The next morning the family goes to a store where the boy is given an idol of wendigo, a so called creature by a Red Indian...... This film is utterly boring. Nothing happens. Most of the scenes r shot in the dark n to add to the turmoil, the shaky cam stuff is even more irritating. Ther is zero kills, no gore, tension n suspense is lacking n forget bah the lousy sex scene with nada nudity. Generous with 5 cos of decent acting n a lil eerie atmosphere. Saw this recently for the first time.

I like horror movies a lot and have seen a great many of them. I rented this movie with misgivings which were, alas, justified. For approximately the first hour, very little happened. A couple & small child driving along the woods hit a deer then encounter some hunters, one of whom has a screw loose. Words are exchanged and the family eventually gets unstuck from the ditch they ran into after hitting the deer. After that, for about an hour, not much happens.

A horror movie, above all, should not be boring, and this one is. All that happens occurs in the last 1/2 hour.

Kim (Patricia Clarkson), George (Jake Weber) and son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan) are headed to the country for winter weekend relief from Manhattan's bustling metropolis. On the way, they hit a buck and end up stuck in the snow. A group of hunters who were tracking the buck come along. Rather than helping, at least one of the hunters, Otis (John Speredakos), is mad because the accident cracked the buck's antlers. George, Kim and Miles are disturbed by Otis, and even worse, we quickly learn that Otis has learned where they're staying. Meanwhile, Miles is given a wendigo (a kind of Indian shape-shifting spirit/monster) token by an Indian whom only he has seen. Is Otis a psycho out to get our heroes? Are there wendigos in the woods?

I can see where Wendigo would have a number of problems appealing to viewers. It is a fairly low budget film, with technical limitations frequently showing through. Much of the film, and maybe all of it, is not really about the titular creature. And perhaps the fatal blow for many people, it has a very ambiguous ending, with a number of questions left unanswered. If you are discouraged by such endings, and you do not like films that have an aim of making you think about and discuss what everything meant, do yourself a favor and avoid Wendigo.

Personally, I like films like that. I usually prefer some ambiguity. The marketing of Wendigo is geared towards those who want a quick, scary creature flick, where they'd expect a grand battle with some supernatural monster who is defeated in the end, and everything is tied up neatly except for an opening for Wendigo 2: The Monster Returns, but that's not what this film is. Wendigo is much more thoughtful and poetic than the surface of such a creature flick would suggest to most people. Heck, writer/director Larry Fessenden even has a character, George, reciting Robert Frost. The Frost poem, and George's comment that Frost can evoke complex imagery and atmosphere out of seemingly simple things, is the key to the film.

One of the best things about the film is its complexity. In a way, there are four different films occurring at the same time, a thread from each character. In George's thread, he isn't exactly the happiest or most pleasant guy in the world, and he has some parenting problems. For him, the film is a realistic, horrific descent of his life going from bad to worse. In Patricia's thread, she's looking for rejuvenation of her life and family. She's a psychologist mostly denying the problems around her, hoping that they'll go away and get better. In Otis' thread, he's even more down on his luck than George, and George's arrival into his life symbolizes the final "crack" in his psychological armor. And in Miles' thread, which is probably the most important of the film, life is like a grand poem due to his youthful innocence and interpretation of the world. But this is a horror story, after all, albeit one with a glimmer of hope, and the events in the film give Miles' poetic interpretations a dark turn. Still, when everything is said and done, he seems to be the only one retaining his composure, due to the poetic outlook.

Even though the film is low budget, there are a lot of well-executed higher budget ambitions. Fessenden and director of photography Terry Stacey find some great shots in beautiful locations, and created some interesting slide show like montages (such as the cards, or the Indian wendigo images from the book). There are also interesting more traditional montages, such as Miles' nightmare. Wendigo is better shot and edited than many big budget films.

Other technical aspects are good for the budget. The "Wendigo" appearance at the end worked for me and was appropriately ambiguous. The lighting was usually good--there were a few times that dark scenes weren't as clear as they could have been, but it seemed to be more of a problem with the film stock (it could have been digital instead) or transfer. I thought the performances were good and far more realistic (if you value that) than the majority of films. Although I didn't really notice the score, it must have been okay, or I would have noticed it with a negative judgment.

Overall, Wendigo is a very good film that deserves to be watched without preconceptions, as long as you don't mind having to think about the movies you watch.

As a character-driven chiller, Wendigo is a thoroughly satisfying film, though not one that successfully plays out its early promise. From the establishing shot of a young family driving a winding road into the darkened wilderness I was immediately reminded of The Shining. And if Wendigo doesn't quite display that films polished visuals, it certainly borrows the themes of isolation and familial tension, especially patriarchal, that Kubrick examined so well. Cult director Larry Fessenden has gone back to horror movie basics to achieve a palpable tension in his film: black shadows in every corner of a very-underlit rural house, creaky floorboards, shrieking nighttime winds. His film starts to unravel when he pushes to far - the appearance of the Wendigo, an Indian spirit that travels on the wind, is at first frightening but ultimately overplayed; Fessenden feels compelled to reveal the monster in an extended attack sequence on the films hillbilly badguy, and in doing so belies the slyness with which we had so successfully frightened us up to that point. The ending is particularly murky, both visually and narratively, feeling rushed and a little self-consciously obscure. The cast is uniformly solid: Jake Weber and Patricia Clarkson as the yuppies-in-peril are very real, and 'Malcolm In The Middle' youngster Erik Per Sullivan provides the perfect conduit for audience fear and apprehension. The print I viewed at the recent AFM conference was particularly grainy and I am unsure as to whether this was due to the transfer from HDV-to-film or whether Fessenden shot it like that. Regardless, it proved very effective in creating a sense of dread and foreboding, especially in the early twilight scenes. Also nice to see a film that revels in its ability to scare, not always winking at the audience in a self-mocking "Scream" sort-of way. More often than not lately irony and revisionism have gotten in the way of a good fright, which Wendigo certainly provides.