When the Wind Blows LetterboxD Review

Link to Original Review

I can see why When the Wind Blows is so warmly regarded. I can just about remember the late 80's when the Berlin Wall still stood and Russia, North Korea, Iran and China were still countries that adults were cautiously fearful of. So When the Wind Blows makes perfect sense as a cautionary tale of what could happen to a middle aged couple in the event of a nuclear strike hitting close to their rural home.

In the same way that today, we're all petrified about the end of the world and have been completely saturated with films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow and Anonymous, the story about William Shakespeare being a fraud that rounds off Roland Emmerich's fictional apocalypse trilogy (ID4 is real dammit... Vote #Pullman 2016)... back in the 80's it was stories like this that sum up at least a small aspect of the psyche of a generation.

So the film itself moves along a a decent enough pace... With a run time on the short side of 90 minutes (80) its brief but with just the two central characters to hold the story, it does rely heavily on the strength of those two characters. And this for me was where Where The Wind Blows was lacking... Both were likable enough for the most part but the Hilda character seemed heavily underdeveloped to the point that at times, it felt downright draconian in its portayal of a weak(er), ambivalent and even to the extreme of being downright ignorant and stupid to the wider world, wife to a husband. This may have been the point that Raymond Briggs and/or director Jimmy T. Murakami wanted to get across, to see how (in their eyes) this class and intelligence of people would react in such a scenario, to me, it felt like it missed a great opportunity to see an "every man" perspective on a scenario like this. Eventually the out come would no doubt have been the same but at least we would have had people to empathize with... In this scenario, it just felt like they were doomed as much because of their own stupidity, rather than any outside force that they had any control over...

At the end of the day, it's still a powerful statement of 80's fear and paranoia that should resonate with any generation of people on the edge of nuclear war. I just wish the people I was empathizing with had given themselves at the very least a fighting chance!

I rated this film 3 and a half stars out of 5.