If you see him, look away and flee. As soon as he notices you, he will not let go of you until he has devoured you body and soul. Legendary figure among the First Nations, the Wendigo would once have been a man forced to cannibalism to survive. This unnatural act would have transformed him into a malevolent polymorphic spirit forever hungry. In his film The inhuman, premiered at the International Film Festival in Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Jason Brennan revisits the myth by updating it.
The project was born out of a long-standing attraction for this monster whose paths it is best to avoid in the forest.
“My father is an aboriginal from Kitigan Zibi, and my mother is from Quebec from Maniwaki,” explains the filmmaker Anishinaabé, whom he met in Rouyn-Noranda. My father grew up in the community, but when he was younger he left it to go to work in the United States before coming back. My mother got sick when I was young, so I lived in Kitigan Zibi for a few years. From 10 years old to 26 years old, I spent my summers there, worked there. The story of Wendigo, we told it around a fire to scare ourselves. On the other hand, if you tell elders about it, for them, it is not a legend, but a reality. “
In The inhuman, the singer and actor Samian plays Mathieu, a neurosurgeon who smiles: adored in the profession, he has a wife, Julie (Véronique Beaudet), and a boy, Lucas (Louis Gallant), whom he adores.
However, behind this smooth facade, nothing is going any more for Mathieu. A divorce is imminent, and her father has just passed away after a long illness. Or was it a curse?
Troubled, Mathieu is suddenly gripped by a memory hitherto buried. One evening as a child, he discovered a ragged deer in the shed before spotting a Wendigo feeding in a corner. Assaulted by the Wendigo soon after, Mathieu’s father was not quite the same thereafter. And here is Lucas drawing something that looks a little too much like the monster…
A devouring void
What the hell is Wendigo? “What fascinates me, actually, is the message behind the Wendigo. “
Jason Brennan elaborates his thought by evoking the metaphorical dimension of Wendigo.
“I was born of two cultures, and the colonialist system often means that we are… torn apart. “
The filmmaker mentions his father again when leaving his community. “There are also similarities between Mathieu and me. Mathieu is someone who got lost, who sought to fill a void in him with success, with material possessions… But material, at the base, among the Aboriginals, that does not exist. It has happened over the years: an uprooted Native will try to fill, to fill… ”
Here, the eternally hungry Wendigo becomes somehow a manifestation of this abyssal void that devours Mathieu from within. By extrapolating, it is also possible to see in Wendigo the dark side that Mathieu carries within him – which we all carry within us – and which can consume him if he is not careful.
Jason Brennan nods, adding, “I’ve been careful about how the Wendigo story is brought into the movie. Because even today there are a lot of elders who believe we shouldn’t talk about it. It is still very entrenched. In the West, there are communities that do not want to know anything about telling this story. In our case, the friend who helped me with the linguistic aspect of the film made sure that we do a smudge [une cérémonie de purification] before the shoot, so that we are protected. “
In this regard, when asked what were the main challenges of the production, Jason Brennan smiles. “Honestly, we had no problem. I was over-prepared, I had everything “storyboarded”… We shot that film under the radar. It was a bit of a trip. “
An old dream
A beautiful trip, since with The inhuman, Jason Brennan happened to make an old dream come true.
“It’s my first feature film as a director, but I’ve been producing for a long time. From the start, I wanted to be a writer and a director, but at the time, fifteen years ago, there was no native producer, so I put that hat on. “
Jason Brennan thus supported other Indigenous filmmakers in their directing projects, notably by producing the two films by Sonia Bonspille Boileau, The dep and Rustic Oracle.
The filming of The inhuman took place in the fall of 2020, during the pandemic. A handful of scenes were filmed in Longueuil. However, the majority of the action, which includes for the neurosurgeon in crisis a return to the fold with his mother (Sonia Vigneault), a stay in the family hunting camp, and many chases through woods and forests, was filmed in Kitigan Zibi. , in Maniwaki and the surrounding area.
“I am aware that if I have such opportunities, it is thanks to my culture. So, for me, it’s important to give back to my community. Either way, I wouldn’t see myself turning a story that is so unique to my community elsewhere than locally. “
This community bias manifests itself in various ways in the film.
“The story in Anishinabemowin at the very beginning comes from oral tradition and is recorded in one of the collections of the cultural center [de Kitigan Zibi]. The voice is that of my aunt, and the story is that of my great aunt, Madeleine Buckshot, who relates how she heard about Wendigo. “
The family sector is in this case important in The inhuman. In fact, in the development of several characters, Jason Brennan says he was inspired by relatives. “For example, Mathieu’s father who speaks little, but knows a lot of things, he’s my uncle. “
An indigenous vision
Present in almost all the scenes, except for the flashbacks where the little Odeshkun Thusky takes over in the role of Mathieu, Samian was, it seems, hardly difficult to convince.
“When I approached Sam, I just asked him if he wanted to take part in a movie about the Wendigo in which he was chased after in the wood by a girl in a costume, and he got in right away. “
For the account, Jason Brennan simplifies with regard to “the girl in costume”, since the creature in his film is very successful. It is the result of a mixture of prosthetic make-up and visual effects added in post-production, which create the illusion of smoke emanations constantly escaping the monster, through all its pores. This subsequent step alone required nearly six months of work.
And for a rare time in the cinema, as in the recent one Antlers, hey, the Wendigo has no panache. At the mention of this detail, Jason Brennan smiles again: “That is not an Aboriginal vision of Wendigo. “
The film The inhuman will appear in 2022. Until then, beware of the Wendigo, which is no longer confined to the forest. In town, it seems, we can hear him, some nights … “Most of the time, he just whistles … If you hear him speak, you talk to him and he answers you, then you die. “
François Lévesque is in Rouyn-Noranda at the invitation of the FCIAT.