The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019)
★★★½ — The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019)
There's a moment in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind where you have to remind yourself that this actually happened. A teenage boy, in the grip of famine, builds a windmill from scraps and salvage and changes the fate of his village. It sounds like something you'd dismiss as too neat, too feel-good, too convenient. But it's real, and the film carries the full weight of that reality on its shoulders with quiet, steady dignity.
This was my Malawi stop on the A-Z World Movie Tour, and what a film to represent a country. Chiwetel Ejiofor writes, directs and stars, and the ambition behind that triple role pays off more often than not. He brings an authenticity to the material that you can feel in every frame, and the performances throughout feel lived-in rather than performed. There's no Hollywood gloss here, no easy shortcuts. The people on screen feel like people, not symbols or types, and that matters enormously when you're telling a true story about survival and ingenuity.
The landscapes of Malawi are genuinely breathtaking. The cinematography gives the land a presence of its own, not as a pretty backdrop but as something the characters are in a real, daily negotiation with. When the rains fail and the crops wither, you feel the weight of that. And the score wraps itself around the whole thing with warmth and soul, drawing on the music of the region without ever feeling like it's performing "Africanness" for an outside audience. It's specific, and specificity is what makes it land.
What makes this so emotionally gripping is the family at the centre of it. The relationship between the boy and his father is the beating heart of the film, full of love and tension and pride and stubbornness, the kind of complicated bond that neither sentimentality nor cynicism can do justice to. Ejiofor handles it with real care. When that relationship is the focus, the film is close to brilliant.
But here's my honest gripe: it's too long. Not ruinously so, but enough to notice. The middle section sags, and there are scenes that circle back over emotional ground already covered without adding anything new. Twenty-five minutes off the runtime and this could have been something truly taut and powerful. As it stands, it's a beautiful film that occasionally loses its own momentum, which is a frustrating thing to say about a story this propulsive on paper.
I kept thinking of Lost Boy in Juba while watching this, another film rooted in African experience and the resilience of young people caught in circumstances far beyond their control. Both films earn their emotional punches by refusing to simplify, by letting difficulty sit alongside hope without rushing to resolve the tension.
The knowledge that you're watching something true never leaves you, and that's both the film's greatest asset and, occasionally, a crutch it leans on when the pacing falters. You keep watching through the slower stretches because you care, because the real person behind the story deserves your attention. That's not nothing. That's actually quite a lot.
Three and a half stars. Imperfect, yes. But moving and important, and directed with a respect for its subjects that comes through in every single scene. Worth your time, even if a tighter cut would have made it easier to recommend without reservation.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2025-07-15
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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