WENDIGO (2001), Directed and Written by Larry Fessenden

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"You know, a lot of people make up stories to make sense of the world. It's a big world, after all, and nobody really understands how it all works.... That's what myths are: they help us talk about stuff.... It's important to know that they're just myths, they're just stories. You'll end up being very disappointed when things don't come true that you're wishing for."

After I saw WENDIGO for the first time last night, I went online to check reviews. These were almost universally negative, which took me by surprise and saddened me.

The trouble, I think, is that WENDIGO comes with expectations of its being a horror film, when it actually works better as a film that, like THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, like THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, looks at the fears of a child too keenly aware of the fears of his parents, of the world around him, yet a child unable to fall back on experience or on mature insight to understand these fears. And so the child mythologizes: a method of coping that leads to complications of its own.

For most of the story, WENDIGO focuses tightly on this chilhood perspective, and in my view, succeeds. The hyper-awareness of a child, which, for an adult, might seem like paranoia, is conveyed well by dark rooms in an unfamiliar house, by shifting trees and gusts of snow, by the sudden dead stillness of a frozen landscape, by the barely-understood comments and conversations of parents who must deal with fears of their own.

WENDIGO captures these ordinary yet heightened aspects of life with good attention to detail, with dramatic set-ups and pay-offs that seem down-to-Earth yet unsettling. At the climax, however, its tight focus on the child and on his family shifts to something else, and this, I think, is a mistake: it jettisons the intensity of that narrow focus, and it also drags in traditional horror images that the film lacks technical resources to pull off. I regret this choice: it might not kill the film, but it does harm it.

In the final moments, WENDIGO returns to its narrow, subjective focus on child and family. The result is an ending that carries emotional weight, that succeeds on its own terms, that made me glad to have spent my time with a film that many despise as a waste of time.

WENDIGO plays by its own rules, pays attention to its own concerns, and if you can accept this, then I can recommend it.