Ithaqua has been a long-term passion project for its Canadian director and writer, Casey Walker. In interviews, he has described his struggle to see his conception to the screen, including securing the funding – something that finally came from John Gore, who (as of 2023) has acquired Hammer Films. In the meantime, Walker has directed two other features – A Little Bit Zombie (2012) and Home Bodies (2026) and has produced a number of films, including Chris Nash’s 2024 break-out hit, In A Violent Nature (which we loved).
Ithaqua is set in winter in 1821 at a fur-trading post, Fort Thomas, in the Canadian wilderness. The place is inspired, Walker says, by Fort William Historical Park, a living-history museum in his home town of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Indeed, Ithaqua was filmed at Fort William, at its reconstruction of an early nineteenth-century fur trading post. It was also filmed in an unusually cold winter, and Walker has recounted the enormous challenge of filming in temperatures of minus 34 degrees Celsius to minus 55 (including a scene in which a man strips off his clothes).
Check out Ithaqua‘s trailer, which gives you a sense of how beautiful this film is:
By far one of the highlights of Ithaqua is the world it builds through its locations, its set designs, and its character development. And, suffice it to say, this is no romantic vision of life on the early frontier. Darkness and cold surrounds and envelops the characters all the time, in a film lit mostly by natural lighting (fire) that struggles and fails to keep both darkness and cold at bay.
The film centers on white American hunter Cole Franklin (Luke Hemsworth) who’s temporarily living at Fort Thomas with his Indigenous wife Ahnang (Leenah Robinson, who appeared in Taylor Sheridan’s 1923) and her grandmother. The fort is home to some English soldiers, working for George IV and ‘the Company,’ as well as an assortment of Indigenous people, white settlers, soldiers, and traders. The main business is fur trading, which seems to have ground to a halt and, in the depths of winter, there is no food and seemingly no animals to kill for food. Ithaqua does a brilliant job of depicting the mix of people thrown together at the fort – different nationalities, races, religions, occupations, and vested interests. They are all, though, drawn precariously together by a hunger that is nearing starvation. As things slowly descend into revolt at the fort, a native girl shows up – mute and mysterious (no one knows who she is or what tribe she’s from).
As things get worse, four of the men at the fort – Cole, his French-Canadian friend, Nicolette (Craig Lauzon), the English Lieutenant Walker (Kevin Durand), and a rather obviously sick Hendry (Aaron Poole) – travel to a nearby Indigenous village that has been eerily silent to find out what’s happened there – and, of course, to get food by any means. This journey is one of the highlights of the film; it features beautiful cinematography and illuminates the characters of the men on this trek, all of whom have complex pasts, allegiances and histories. We learn, for instance, that although Cole and Nicolette are now friends, Cole fought with the Americans against the French and Indigenous people at the Battle of the Thames during the War of 1812. And Nicolette, Cole discovers, who is French and once fought for Napoleon, has an Ojibwe mother. These men mirror the shifting alliances and complicated roots of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century life in Canada.
Ithaqua’s strength is definitely the ways it grounds its story in realism – in landscape, weather, and character. It introduces the eerie supernatural aspects slowly, largely through the strangely mute girl, some strange symbols revealed by the camera on trees and snow, and hints of bizarre rituals in which the soldiers at the fort may be engaged. When the four men arrive at the deserted village, though, the horror becomes more visually explicit, as they find a pile of severed body parts, some of which come to uncanny ‘life.’ Human body parts then start to take on a larger role – and a more realistic role – as it’s soon revealed that strange sacrificial ritual and cannibalism are taking root in the fort itself, bridging supernatural horror with historical accounts of surviving cannibalism on the starving North American frontiers (most infamously at Jamestown).
The cannibalism at the fort, rooted in sacrifice as well as survival, seems to be connected to an entity called Ithaqua – ‘the wind with teeth’ – whom Ahnang’s grandmother aligns with the silent girl who appeared among them. Ithaqua is related to the wendigo, and Walker depicts its presence in a way that acknowledges its roots in Indigenous belief systems as well as signaling a cannibalism that’s about survival for western white settlers.
Although the film doesn’t engage in much exposition about the entity Ithaqua, fans of the cosmic weird can trace it through the writings of August Derleth, Algernon Blackwood, and, of course, H. P. Lovecraft. In “The Thing That Walked on the Wind,” published in Strange Tales in January 1933 (which you can find here), August Derleth named “Ithaqua,” which he described as a “wind-walking elemental” and a “pagan god.” (Derleth published a follow-up story titled “Ithaqua” in Strange Stories in 1941.) In “The Thing That Walked on the Wind,” Derleth elaborates a literary prehistory for Ithaqua in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo” (1910), a story of what Derleth calls “air elementals” set in Northwestern Ontario, and also in the Cthulhu tales of H. P. Lovecraft.
Walker himself describes the mythology of Ithaqua as emerging from his own Catholicism as well as the knowledge of Indigenous lore brought to the film by co-producer Peter Vicaire, who helped flesh out the “accurate elements of the wendigo.” For me, the result is perhaps the best incarnation of wendigo lore outside of Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), which similarly mixes the presence of outsider whites in a Canadian Indigenous settlement (an Anishinaabe community in northern Canada), food scarcity, cannibalism, and the presence of the voracious wendigo.
Walker adds that both he and Vicaire are also Lovecraft fans and influenced by the Cthulhu mythos:
Peter and I are both huge Lovecraft fans, and he was like, ‘What about Ithaqua?’ And it just clicked. Someone else had already taken all those things down the line to create something new that was already part of the thing were doing. So then we blended the Ithaqua lore and the wendigo lore together to become our own thing.
And this description does encapsulate what’s great about Ithaqua – a kind of persistent syncretism that captures the mixing of peoples and beliefs in early nineteenth-century Canada.
I can’t end this review without mentioning how effectively the main character Cole Franklin is developed. As Walker has said in interviews, Cole is no hero – and never pretends to be – and a distinctly unheroic revelation about his history concludes the film, exposing the traumas of the perennial wars in which men in the early nineteenth century found themselves. I couldn’t help but think of Christopher Nolan’s recent The Odyssey here, with its depiction of a protagonist similarly traumatized by war.
All in all, Ithaqua is a beautiful combination of realism (often itself horrific) with well-paced and expertly interwoven supernatural elements. Stunning cinematography and stellar acting performances by all.
