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Wendigo

2001, Movie, R, 90 mins

Wendigo: Review

WENDIGO
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An intelligent, truly creepy take on a Native American myth from New York City-based filmmaker Larry Fessenden. As night is falling in snowy upstate New York, Manhattan photographer George (Jake Weber), his therapist wife Kim (Patricia Clarkson) and their young son Miles (Malcolm in the Middle's Erik Per Sullivan) are on their way to a friend's country house when a terrible accident occurs: A large deer suddenly appears out of nowhere, and George, unable to stop, slams into it. Shaken but unhurt, George backs the car into a snow bank just as three hunters, who've been tracking the buck for the past 18 hours, emerge from the woods. Rather than lending a hand, however, one of them, Otis (John Speredakos), gives George a hard time, waving around his gun and scaring Kim and Miles. It's more than just macho posturing: Seething beneath the surface is a deep resentment of intruding city slickers, one of whom has ruined his buck. The sun goes down and the car is eventually freed, but once George arrives at the house, he's disturbed to find that someone has fired a shot through one of the windows. He suspects Otis, but there's something far more powerful roaming the snowy woods. One afternoon at the local drugstore, Miles encounters a spectral Native American man who tells him about the wendigo — a huge, shape-shifting spirit that can move like the wind and is possessed of a voracious appetite. Confused and frightened by all the violence of the weekend, Miles is inclined to believe the tale. Like Abel Ferrara before him, Fessenden reworks well-trod genre territory to fit his own personal vision, and the results are always interesting. His last two features, NO TELLING and HABIT, turned the hoary Frankenstein and vampire legends inside out to offer smart, socially conscious scares that dealt frankly with environmentalism and addiction. Here Fessenden uses the figure of the shapeshifter to explore the legacy of American violence and the great chain of displacement that began with Native American genocide and continues with the exploitation of rural land by city dwellers. But make no mistake: For all its moral concerns, the film is pretty scary. Rather than going for cheap shocks, Fessenden uses an unsettling mix of montage, time-lapse photography and animation to create an atmosphere of great, unknowable menace that closely approximates the haunted spirit of Algeron Blackwood's unforgettable tale "The Wendigo." These hills are indeed alive. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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