With the success of Killers of the Flower Moon, there’s a renewed interest in authentic and respectful depictions of Native American stories. Low budget supernatural horror might not be the best approach, considering its history of stereotyping, but The Windigo is a fairly sincere stab at reframing the genre. The wicked looking, titular creature pulls together plenty of the issues Native Americans currently face, such as forgotten culture, violence, and institutional negligence, but the film also surprisingly delves into past collective trauma some of these communities have experienced. The Windigo plays out the way you would expect a creature feature to be, but the film could have been so much more with better execution.
An ancient Chippewa demon, the WINDIGO, is resurrected by a Native American teenager and his grandmother to protect their family after a run-in with back-woods meth dealers. They soon discover that the creature’s lust for killing cannot be controlled. As each killing bonds the teen and the Windigo ever closer, the family must find a way to break the curse before all of them become the blood-thirsty creature’s next victims.
With their grandmother with dementia now living alone, Native American siblings Ryan and Bree move to her house for the holidays. An encounter with backwoods meth dealers leads the family to resurrect an ancient demon for protection, however, they soon discover that the creature’s bloodlust can’t be controlled.
The cast feels a tad unbalanced, as Fivel Stewart has more charisma than Marco Fuller. In all honesty, both their characters are written thinly, but Stewart manages to inject more personality to Bree in her performance than Fuller does to Ry, and that gap is made more prominent because Ry is written to be more unlikeable than Bree.
It’s certainly better than other stereotypical depictions, but one can’t help but wonder what it could have been with a bigger budget.
