The gloomy isolation of homemaking females has long been a significant topic across various genres in cinema, depicted in domestic dramas like Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman” and in psychodramas like Todd Haynes’ “Safe.” With her debut feature “The Wind,” a psychedelic yet baggy period-horror film, director Emma Tammi assertively carries this female-focused subject matter over to one of the most masculine of genres, the Western, with technical panache yet mixed dramatic results.
A respectable addition to the growing group of female-led Westerns of recent vintage — including “Meek’s Cutoff,” “The Homesman” and “Jane Got a Gun” — Tammi’s supernatural thriller unearths claustrophobic fears amid vast, deserted landscapes and attempts to portray symbolically the multitude of forces, otherworldly and otherwise, that aim to paralyze abandoned women.