Wendigo

A chamber drama bundled up to survive fireside shadows, Wendigo sends a family of three—father George (Jake Weber), mother Kim (Patricia Clarkson), son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan)—upstate from their New York City home looking for something like respite. Contending with icy weather on the way, their car fatally collides with a buck scrambling over the frozen road, only to find out that a coterie of hunters—led by the wild-eyed Otis (John Speredakos)—had been tracking the deer for a long while. Robbed of his kill, Otis harangues George, inaugurating the first of Wendigo’s many morphing configurations: whether civilized from urban settings or let loose in the frontier, masculine rage unabated leads every soul to their own apocalypse. As the family settles into their temporary lodging, Miles feels something off in the air, and, in haunted bedroom shots that woggle Spielberg’s child seers in his own domestic drama, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the boy becomes a spectator sensor for the monstrous metaphor assembling itself in midair. On a visit into town, an Indigenous shopkeeper (Lloyd Oxendine) clarifies what that monster might be: “A wendigo is a mighty powerful spirit,” he explains. “The wendigo is hungry, and its hunger is never satisfied. The more it eats, the bigger it gets, and the bigger it gets, the hungrier it gets. And we are hopeless in the face of it.”

But what is it? Borrowed from Algonquian folklore, the wendigo (a collation, a loanword probably borrowing equally from Cree and Ojibwe languages) is a particularly turbulent metaphor-monster. In the folk tradition, it’s a possessing spirit that variably inspires gluttony, cannibalism, and homicidal thoughts in its victims. Less ethereally, though, the wendigo indicates imbalance, especially of an ecological sort: individuals afflicted with the wendigo exhaust resources, usually at their own expense. The wendigo can stand as a monstrous avatar for white land theft and our national American genocide as sure as it can be twisted by non–First Nations writers into a thing precisely indicating “savageness,” as in Algernon Blackwood’s 1910 novella, The Wendigo, or Stephen King’s 1983 work, Pet Sematary. Invoked as it is in Fessenden’s Wendigo as a multipart montage of varying monstrous forces, the wendigo both is and isn’t all of these things. Appropriately, the film’s writer/director/editor presents it as a creature of pure montage, a cacophony of 16mm photography and jittering still images and bones and antlers. It is purely in Miles’s imagination, and it is literally the cause of his family’s dissolution. It emerges from the haunted, genocide-struck land north of the civilized (which is to say, settler-stolen) New York City, and it is conjured in the angers, righteous and stupid alike, in Wendigo’s stunted men. An audience—like a starving man possessed in the wilderness—exhibits an appetite for meaning. Gracefully, Fessenden constructs the space for communicating such matters and elides it, leaving something scarier by way of this stillness. Like Miles by the film’s end, we are left without a guide, apprehending monstrous shapes in the dark, shoving them into our too-human containers in the cold sunlight.