At the turn of the millennium, found footage horror was born and while it’s often a very divisive subgenre nowadays (as big budget companies co-opted it since it lowered the already low costs for horror films), it can’t be denied The Blair Witch resparked interest in urban legends, the lore of the suburbs or previously forgotten folklore myths, which affected even films not made in what now we call “found footage” or “mockumentary”.
This is i guess was the overall unspoken mood of the era, even though in this case director and writer Larry Ferdessen (1997’s Habit, the Until Dawn videogames, The Last Winter, Depraved) set out more to channel the 30s classic horror monster films (which the director himself confirmed are a great influence on his works) but in modern arthouse fashion, with a psychological horror thriller named after the mythical monster figure of Native American/First Nation folklore (Algonquian one, to be precise), of the titular Wendigo.
The plot concerns a photographer, George, and his family, as they experience a malevolent force upon them during their weekend stay at a cabin in upstate New York, while they are stalked by a local hunter after accidentally hitting a deer on the road.
As the weekend progresses, Miles, George’ son, starts to have vivid allucinations of the legendary Wendigo, whom he believes is responsible for the dark force haunting them.
The classic monsters angle is made manifest right away, as the film begins with the kid smashing together two toys, a Transformers-esque robot and a wolfman looking like Lon Chaney Jr., there’s many uses of old depictions of tribal rites, mythological illustrations, all used to put us in the prospective of the kid, conveying the unfettered impact and nightmares both these images and the real events with the hunter and deer left on his young mind, where shadows take shapes of monster, hiding under the bed or closet, or worse, as now something realer than any spirit has shaken him.
The film perfectly transport the viewer into that mindset, with an eerie atmosphere of icy isolation and sense of anxiety, magnified by the kid vivid nightmares being fed the idea of the Wendigo, of spirits and forces beyond that he simply believes, maybe because its mind its subcosciounsly making him see things to cope with the lack of attention from his father, whom does actually try to rectify his somewhat dismissal of the boy’s needs, the characters are pretty realistic and relatable.
It’s pretty haunting and tense, it builds effectly by complementing the hallucinations of the boy to other small hints that the threath might be actually real and far from fabricated, as the parents find strange fractures and defects around the house, itself looking quite old and with more history than it seems, so there’s always something that never lets that feeling of unease go away.
I’ve noted that even positive reviews of the movie criticized harshly the ending, that it’s sour what’s otherwise a great movie, but personally i think it fits even though it straddles the line between vague and actually providing some resolution, actually answers most of the questions you’d have but implying more than stating the nature of the Wendigo, which also looks extra creepy in his typical fashion of “horned man-animal skeletal beast”, and in this case it’s not like supernatural and psychology are mutually exclusive, quite the opposite.
One could argue an even more vague ending might have served the film better, but then again i’m not against what the actual ending implies and leaves up for interpretation, nor i’m against all the plot points eventually coming together and receiving an explanation that doesn’t devalue the entire thing, even if a bit more conventional than everything else that does lead up to the finale.
Quite good and worth checking out, just don’t expect it to be a conventional monster film.
Wise Cafe (International) 