The doorway shot in John Ford’s “The Searchers” is one of the most influential cinematic frames of all time.
But it’s not often we really parse the meaning of that iconic image, or seek to understand the way it has shaped our understanding of the western as an outdoorsy, masculine genre.
Emma Tammi’s feature debut, a clever if low-boil horror-western, provokes such ruminations by being, essentially, a reverse of that shot: Instead of our eye following John Wayne walking off into a bright rectangle of scrubby land framed by the dark silhouette of a cabin doorway, “The Wind” imagines a Wild West where the man walks off into darkness and we stay inside the brightly lit cabin, where the women are.That’s not to suggest there’s anything cozily domestic about Tammi’s vision of the feminine West.
In fact, in “The Wind,” the agoraphobic lonesomeness
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