General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Wind (2018 film)

The Wind is a 2018 American horror-western film directed by Emma Tammi and written by Teresa Sutherland, in which a 19th-century frontierswoman named Lizzy, isolated on the plains with her frequently absent husband Isaac, comes to believe a demonic presence is stalking her homestead.¹ It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2018, where it was the only female-directed film in that year's Midnight Madness section.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Emma Tammi (directorial debut of a narrative feature); Teresa Sutherland⁴
Genre and length	Horror, Western; 84 minutes per the distributor's page, 86 minutes per festival listings¹^•⁵
Premiere	September 10, 2018, Toronto International Film Festival²
Principal cast	Caitlin Gerard (Lizzy Macklin), Julia Goldani Telles (Emma Harper), Ashley Zukerman (Isaac Macklin), Dylan McTee (Gideon Harper), Miles Anderson (The Reverend)⁶
Source connection	Not based on Dorothy Scarborough's 1925 novel The Wind, but shares a similar premise with the 1928 silent film starring Lillian Gish⁷^•¹⁵
Critical reception	Metascore 66 from 14 critics; Rotten Tomatoes 82%⁸^•⁹
US release	Through IFC Films' Midnight label¹⁰

Spoilers

Plot

Lizzy Macklin and her husband Isaac come from St. Louis to a remote stretch of New Mexico to start a settlement. They live in solitude until Emma and Gideon Harper arrive from Illinois to a damaged cabin nearby. Lizzy befriends the younger woman, whose marriage looks troubled, and the couples help each other repair the cabin and plant crops. Lizzy confides in Emma about Samuel, the son she lost in a stillbirth. Emma, pregnant, tells Lizzy that something she cannot explain is after her and wants her child.⁶

The film opens with a striking image: Lizzy standing before her house holding a dead baby, her dress soaked in blood, and the story then zigzags between the present and the flashbacked recent past.¹¹ Whether the terrors Lizzy experiences are supernatural or psychological is left open to interpretation; reviewers noted that the film sustains its dread largely apart from that question, building horror from loneliness, disorientation, and despair.¹²

Inspiration and production

Writer Teresa Sutherland, who is from Missouri and lived in Kansas for several years, drew the idea from a conversation at a community garden on the plains, where an older woman told her that in the 1800s the wind on the prairie used to drive settler women crazy. Sutherland then researched and read the diaries of women who had settled Kansas before writing the script.³

Tammi and Sutherland referenced classic westerns and also studied horror films with female protagonists, examining how women enter the horror space through everyday experiences. Tammi cited Carrie and Rosemary's Baby as major reference points, asking how mundane tasks such as fetching water or hanging laundry could be made extraordinary.³ The film was Tammi's debut narrative feature; she grew up in the theater world as the daughter of two actors and had previously directed documentaries including Election Day and Fair Chase.⁴ Before release, IFC Films commissioned a short promotional horror game from independent developer Airdorf, made in a style similar to his game Faith.⁶

Style and themes

The film combines the Western with folklore horror, in which suggestion matters more than reality, and uses a non-linear narrative, oppressive images of the endless landscape, and dissonant music.⁵ Critics placed it in a line of recent films showing how brutal the frontier was for women, alongside Meek's Cutoff, The Homesman, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, with Film Comment calling it probably the most overt modern example of the hybrid cycle dubbed "Weird West."¹¹

A 2023 scholarly analysis in the Journal of Popular Film and Television read the film's horrific representations of the body, the mind, and the home as reflecting the psychic experience of melancholic grief associated with reproductive loss, arguing that the spatial relations between the interior homestead and the exterior landscape mirror that grief and that the film problematizes the expectation that mothers conceal feelings of loss, animosity, and jealousy.¹³ Reviewers also noted the film's subversion of the trope of the unhinged, neglected woman no one will believe, and its engagement with female rage, revenge, agency, and fertility.¹⁴

Reception

On Metacritic the film scored 66, "generally favorable," based on 14 critic reviews, with 64% positive and 36% mixed and no negative reviews; the user score was 5.9.⁸ Rotten Tomatoes listed it at 82%.⁹ Critics singled out Lyn Moncrief's cinematography, which turns the vacancy of the plains into both hostile observer and hellish metaphor, and the film's sound design.⁸^•¹⁴ Common criticisms targeted the non-chronological structure: TheWrap argued the splintered timeline works against the story's psychological continuity, and Film Comment found the genre blend of Western and horror elements uneven, with a climax that overplays its hand.¹⁴^•¹¹ The film has been compared to Jennifer Kent's The Babadook as a psychological horror centered on a woman's interior experience.⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026