Review: Wind River

Image courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Taylor Sheridan's "Wind River" has been labeled as a murder mystery and while that's true, the picture - which is the second outing behind the camera for the "Hell or High Water" scribe - is also an old school western - and a very good one at that. Somewhat similar to Michael Apted's 1992 thriller "Thunderheart," Sheridan's film is a mystery set on a Native American reservation.

Only, this time, the setting is the harsh, wintry wilds of Wyoming, where Jeremy Renner's hunter and tracker Cory Lambert bides his time preventing wolves and mountain lions from killing local steer and sheep. Lambert, who has a young son and an estranged wife, is - much like the western heroes of old - hiding some pain from his past that is only slowly revealed.

His scars begin to come to the surface after a young Native American woman is found raped and seemingly murdered in the snow. Lambert tries to console her grieving family with the knowledge that the girl ran six miles in freezing conditions in which most people would last only a few steps, therefore making her a fighter. But he knows from personal experience that nothing, as he points out on several occasions, can make the pain go away, other than time.

Elizabeth Olsen shows up as Jane Banner, the investigating FBI agent, whose proclivity is to not waste time with small talk and get to the point - which, to some, make her appear callous. Upon realizing that her best bet in discovering the girl's killer - or killers - is to work with Lambert, but also the local reservation sheriff (Graham Greene), she enlists both men in the investigation, for which Jane knows that she'll have no FBI backup, considering that the coroner pronounced the girl dead from frozen lungs, rather than the blows inflicted upon her.

Much like "Hell or High Water," the film soaks in the atmosphere of its setting. While that previous picture made great use of desert vistas, "Wind River" presents a frigid, harsh climate that makes one shiver by merely viewing it. During the course of the picture, the evils that men do to one another almost play second fiddle to the wrath of Mother Nature.

Sheridan's picture is an engrossing whodunit but, as I'd mentioned, it also tips its hat to the western genre - and a final showdown between a villain and Lambert's character is one that might have felt at home in an old Howard Hawks or John Ford movie. There's also a particularly tense standoff involving a whole group of characters that is shocking due to how quickly it escalates into a shootout.

"Wind River" is a genre - or genres - movie, of sorts, but it has more on its mind than this. Lambert's character is sympathetic to the plight of the Native Americans among whom he lives and there's an expertly made sequence during which he questions a local bad seed - and although he roughs the guy up after he gets out of line, he can also sympathize with the conditions that have led this fellow down a dark road. Much like the best of cinema's detectives or western heroes, Lambert is a conflicted and multi-faceted character - and "Wind River" is all the better for it. It's a well made and rich - both visually and thematically - thriller.