Wendigo

The movie's filter.

This is crucial: The only point of view that counts in Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo is a scared little boy’s whose imagination is so wild that he never, ever should be considered a reliable witness to the events. Looking back over the film, I am convinced that it is impossible to know how much of what we see is a child’s fantasy and how much of it is reality. But no other reality counts except for the child’s, who views his surroundings with a naive dread that keeps everything foreign and potentially dangerous. There’s a point early when the child lies down to sleep, and I’m starting to wonder if he ever actually wakes up.

This point of view is responsible for both the film’s gripping achievement and its ultimate failure. There are moments so saturated in icy trepidation that we are chilled to the bone, and writer/director Fessenden achieves this quiet terror through the sheer power of suggestion—tree stumps become knotted faces, a dead deer scowls lifelessly, etc. Yet within this context, the film becomes problematic: If we are witnessing a child’s active imagination gone awry, as we very much suspect, how much of it can actually scare us, especially when it goes ridiculously over the top and leaves the previously muted scenes behind? The wendigo of the title is a sort of man-deer forest spirit, but none of its scenes frighten us because we question their authenticity. The events surrounding this creature are probably not actually happening; rather, they are playing out in the child’s mind as he interprets events the way he wants them to occur. The first two-thirds of the film effectively conveys a child’s isolation and paranoia, but by the time it kicks into its final act, the fear turns into a hallucination that fails to register any reaction but outrage. We’ve been conned, and the film is reduced to a cheap parlor trick.

I'll get back to that in a minute; in the meantime, we watch a fascinating film surrounding the con-job, and it works well enough to forgive Fessenden when he cheats. The storyline concerns a loving family’s weekend vacation in an isolated village. Some of their neighbors act unjustifiably (so it would seem) hostile towards them, and twists develop throughout that make us question the true identities (and innocence) of all parties. This plot belongs to another movie—perhaps a neatly-packaged domestic thriller. For purposes of Wendigo, the story exists to provide comfortable padding for the child in this loving family, Miles, to explore his fears and fantasies. Everything is filtered through his perspective, especially the snow-covered woods and the alienation from citizens of the town, who appear antagonistic only because they represent a terrain with which Miles isn’t familiar.

Examine most of the interactions in this film on their own terms, and you will see that nothing particularly threatening or unusual happens. People act rudely, drunkenly, etc., but never violently, except in a few key sequences that may or may not be Miles’ imagination or misinterpretation. Viewed through Miles’ viewpoint, everything unknown is threatening, and so we are threatened through his eyes. Miles’ laundry list of childhood phobias—monsters in the closet, wandering away from parents, and authoritative punishment—are a reality to him, and they thus become our reality. We never react to events in the film, but we rather react to Miles’ reaction to them.

It must be noted that Larry Fessenden’s command of technique is often so good that we grow powerless to the way he leads us by the hand through the labyrinth of Miles’ mind. The film is perfectly paced and timed, so that every sequence, every edit reveals the method of a director who knows exactly what he is doing. I cannot reveal his technique without giving away crucial frights, but I can provide clues: Watch carefully the way Fessenden combines a series of quick edits with long, contemplative takes, and thus moves from frantic to somber and back again with ease and control. This editing trick applies to scenes of dialogue as much as moments of action, forcing an intentionally inconsistent rhythm to the film. Such movement corresponds with Miles’ perceptions as his emotions dance between dread to panic. It is, frankly, brilliant filmmaking by a skillful and confident craftsman.

Hitchcock moments abound, such as a bullet hole in a wall that zooms into a secret compartment, but Fessenden makes such sequences his own by adding quirky touches that only an observant child would pick up on. In a critical scene, Miles and his mother confront some rednecks butchering a deer on their patio, a bloody enough sight as is, and perhaps traumatizing to a child whose mother feeds him only pasta and salads. But Fessenden’s eye for detail heightens the power of these images by giving us tiny additions that the mother, in her frantic state, wouldn’t have picked up on. One of the redneck children, for example, has a Band-Aid on his face, and it wrinkles as the boy grins at Miles, crinkling up to reveal a small cut underneath. If you’re not paying close attention, you will recognize that this scene is creepy, but you might not notice that it is creepy precisely because of a touch so small. Such detail glowers like a menacing gargoyle over a stunned Miles.

The acting and dialogue also have a fresh poignancy to them, as if much of it is spontaneous and improvised. Jake Weber and Patricia Clarkson as the parents and Erik Per Sullivan as Miles make a believable family, so much so that we feel uncomfortable watching them in some of their private moments because we feel like we’re intruding. I’m pretty sure that all of the scenes with the parents are not based in Miles’ fantasy, even though we see them through his perspective. We can therefore get a pretty good idea of their family dynamics, and Weber and Clarkson display subtleties that a real, strained marriage would contain without ever directly stating marital problems. Their interactions with their son are real and authentic; there is a moment in which Weber invites his son to go sledding that is either very good improvising or exceptional writing, and the attention to the dialogue even in these most banal of moments indicates a careful consideration for the characters that you don’t find in many thrillers, which often rely heavily on stock characters to produce cheap thrills.

It is curious how all of this thoughtful craftsmanship and careful attention to detail leads up to a third act that is such a painful mess. If we are meant to believe that these events, in which the wendigo finally shows up, are real, then they are forced and ridiculous inserts that have no place in a psychological horror film. If they are, as I suspect, hallucinations from a child who has been troubled by recent events, then they are so over the top in comparison to his previous fantasies that they seem to have wandered in from another movie. To have a film so subdued suddenly kick into action-packed high gear in which the monster finally comes out of the shadows and begins to terrorize victims like a slasher-killer is inappropriate. I can believe that Miles would have these fantasies in order to cope with the strenuous circumstances that the film puts him in, but I wonder why Fessenden chooses this gory tone. In a horror film that has previously implied a spirit’s presence with misshapen rocks and rotting trees, we don’t want to see the monster. Miles’ imagination, which contains horrors unspoken and unseen, will suffice over literal images. It is enough that we know Miles is seeing this creature, and Fessenden should have stressed his reaction to them in his mind’s eye instead of going for shock-value. I guess he should have watched The Cat People again to relearn the value of implication.

The final scene, fortunately, returns to the quiet nature of the early sequences, ending the film on an enduring high-note. Fessenden finally steps out of Miles’ point of view for one, fleeting moment, and it is a crucial shot. We know what we see, and we know what Miles sees, and we assume they are the same thing. But are they necessarily? (Read the rest of this paragraph after you’ve seen the film.) Who, in the end, is on the second stretcher? If we can believe the previous, overblown scenes, it is exactly who Miles thinks it is. If these scenes were indeed Miles’ hallucinations, then it doesn’t matter who it is, only that Miles’ perception has brought his nightmarish day to some sort of closure for him. I believe that the closing moments are critical to understanding the difference between what is really happening versus what Miles thinks is happening, and it reinforces Fessenden’s ability to manipulate our visual sense by suggesting that fact and truth are really just a matter of who is observing the proceedings.

So, Wendigo’s messy third act almost destroys the film, but Fessenden’s skill and calculation throughout keep it afloat. Here is a born filmmaker, making a film that disturbs and contorts us by suggesting children’s purity can be frightening if they see the world around them as something less than blissful. The child ceases to be an innocent and turns into prey. The world ceases to be a playground and turns into, well, a wendigo.

Cast:
Erik Per Sullivan: Miles
Jake Weber: George
Patricia Clarkson: Kim
John Speredakos: Otis
Lloyd Oxendine: Elder
Christopher Wynkoop: Sheriff Tom Hale

Artisan presents an Antidote Films release. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden. Rated R, for violence, gore, language, and a sex scene. Running time: 91 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: January 23, 2001 (at the Slamdance Film Festival).