Thunderbird teeters on the precipice of well-intentioned bigotry. It’s not entirely satisfied with being a mystery, so it makes a last minute foray into the supernatural thriller genre and ends up doing both somewhat poorly. Some of the outdoor sets, like the giant old ship run aground, dazzle, but the indoor shots are bare and lack the life layer that would have lent them a little bit of believability and visual interest. We have a poor sense of distance and cohesion both of time and place. Once the mystery is solved, you will be confused and a little bit disappointed, because the story isn’t building up to a grand conversation, an intellectual reveal. Instead, the point of highest tension is low budget SFX for a film that could’ve done without and shouldn’t done without in lieu of a more emotionally satisfying end.
The film feels directionless, something conjured up with catchphrases and premises that will attract liberal progressive viewers sympathetic to the plight of Coast Salish peoples aka “First Nations” aka “Indians” aka “savages,” depending on how edgy the script wants to be at any given time. Despite the movie’s apparent interest in First Nations lore and culture, the protagonist and his sister are white. Natalie Brown, the Heinz Ketchup girl, who also starred in Saw V, with recurring roles on Sophie, Bitten, The Strain, Dark Matter, and more recently Amazon’s Jack Ryan, as well as the voice of Daisy Lee in FarCry 3 (!!!), may or may not have tribal ancestry, but she plays a character (Detective Ivy Seymour, “See More,” get it?) who doesn’t, the world’s least professional detective who keeps newspaper clippings about her own termination next to her motel room’s bedside table and lets a person of interest tag along on all of her investigation despite his involvement in the case itself, which unsurprisingly leads to some mishaps later on. That leaves some token First Nations character actors who do what they can with the script they’ve been given, which means staring blankly from a lineup while a young boy points at them for a crime they did or didn’t commit while a creepy, superimposed crow ancestral spirit charges forward out of the one way mirror, or standing around a lodge to watch a performance of sacred rituals, or beating up a white boy in a tool shop, or–maybe the hardest the swallow–giving away their most prized family mask as a form of hush payment to a non-member.
The twist of this movie–if there is one worth saving I’m not sure what it is–seems to premise itself on a suspected abducted woman’s white guilt about wrongs done in the past, which lead to her institutionalization and subsequent radicalization by mystical cultic leaders. It’s not quite clear, except that the billing for this movie alludes to a kind of sex-murder cult brewing in some town in British Columbia. It’s a little hard to follow all of this, because there’s so much instability of location and ethnicity in this film, you don’t quite know how confusing it is until it’s all over.
We appear to be on a reservation on the West Coast of Canada, somewhere that a young Anglo-Canadian like Will Brook and his sister Sara live relatively uncomfortably with locals, who are understandably bitter about the way that law enforcement used two children to pin a murder on their chief two decades earlier. Will is the recipient of a lot of unfair racial animus, which feels like the reverse of what might be expected from any storyteller trying to respectfully recenter the power imbalances of a post-colonial storyline. It’s clear that he’s treading on their space though, and that law enforcement do not look like the people they’re policing for the most part. What makes the premise all the more ethnically confusing is the fact that the men, whom we initially suppose to be abducting young women, look like white guys in army camo, and the women that they abduct follow no discernible racial or ethnic pattern: they’re Anglo, First Nations, no rhyme or reason, which doesn’t feel all that on theme when we arrive at the expiatory purpose for the human sacrifices at the end. The perpetrators appear to be a ragtag group of both European and native ancestry, which, once again, feels fucking crazy, considering their intended purpose.
At first, this movie feels like a lot of white people mucking about in native lands to save the precious white girl and few others from the likes of a few awful back country doomsday preppers, but the deeper you go, the more messy the story becomes, and the final turn gives you a sense that the film was never really that interested in cultural understanding or authenticity, but more so was borrowing themes and images to create an unasked for supernatural horror element. The thunderbird we hear about doesn’t sound like a villainous creature. It’s cast as the hero who protects the Coast Salish from monsters, and even after the “light and dark in everything speech,” there’s nothing there to really prepare us the big reveal.
This was my final film of the Cinequest Film Festival’s first week (RIP til August).
