Review 414: Wind River

Wind River is a brutal, visceral, engrossing, riveting and intense Murder Mystery Thriller - one that more than lives up to the chilliness that its title suggests.

Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) is a wildlife officer who finds the body of an 18-year old girl on the Wind River American Indian Reservation in snowy Wyoming. When the autopsy reveals that she was raped, FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) arrives to investigate. Teaming up with Lambert as a guide, the duo soon find that their lives are in danger while trying to solve the mystery of the teen's death.

The plot is so well written, so dense. It lures you into its mystery with its broken characters, unforgiving setting and gorgeous iconography.
What distinguishes Wind River from other films in its genre is how it makes use of its setting.
The Wind River American Indian Reservation is one of the poorest places in North America, an area where winters are brutal to an extreme. The locals have been forced to stay in a place where they wouldn't choose to be. It's a really tragic & intense sort of place. Beautiful in its own right but also very dangerous. It’s almost a character in its own right because it infects every person who inhabits it.

The rules and the laws of the reservation are not the same as we know. It is frontier justice in a lot of ways. A lot of these young people feel like they're doomed, it's the same feeling that character who grow up in tough neighbourhoods feel.
It’s sad because it also shows how unfairly treated Native Americans are treated by the government. The film also shows how one place in which you are forced to live can dictate your worldview and can keep you restricted to not growing or doing much else other than surviving: All the people in Wind River feel mistreated and controlled. They’re squashed into this one place and they can’t get out. They have to have their wits about them and be tough in order to survive.

The film treats its characters with great sympathy as they are thrust into this cruel and unforgiving world.

Writer/director Taylor Sheridan's direction is excellently suspenseful, keeping the audience invested & gripped until the end, the cinematography is beautiful and captures the danger and the beauty of the setting, the scenery is breathtaking, the suspense is killing, the score by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis is hauntingly beautiful and gets the films tone right, the costumes are terrific, the action scenes are excitingly brutal, the production design is appropriately bleak and the ending has a terrific sense of poignancy and sadness about it coupled with a heartbreaking gut punch.

The acting is spot on, Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen are stupendous in this film.
Sheridan treats his characters with great sympathy as they are pushed to the edges of the environment they inhabit and shows a great awareness of what that has done and the world has created for them.

The most interesting part of Renner's performance in this film is how calm he is despite his tough demeanour, he could be on top of his enemy about to deal him a real blow and yet he remains as cool as a cucumber. Underneath it all however, the character of Cory Lambert is a white man who married into a Native American family and has suffered a great loss similar to the one he discovers.
He tires to solve the murder of the daughter of his best friend for that friend and hopefully find a sense of closure for himself as well as get a shot at redemption for his loss which he blames himself for.

Whats so effective about Elizabeth Olsen in the role of Jane Banner is that she's an FBI agent yet she's completely out of her element which puts her at a great contrast with Cory who's is completely in his element as a wildlife officer - this is what he does for a living, he knows what he's doing and what he's getting himself into. Yet at the same time she's trying to do the best job she can and she comes into the situation as a very strong willed woman. She's very good at what she does and she's steel-like on the outside but somehow, someway and thanks in no small part to Olsen's talents, she's able to take that turn where we as an audience can see the vulnerability of this character.
She also acts as our (as an audience) way into this world, she provides this little oasis of humour and outsider light to this very grim and intense film.
Over the course of the film she grows and develops from being very sharp, plucky albeit innocent outsider to starting to understand the harsh brutality of the environment she's in.

Gil Birmingham is also immensely strong in this film playing Martin Hanson, the missing girls father and Cory’s close friend. This is a man who is dealing with a lot of grief and anger - anger at how he and his family have been treated by the government and the world.

Jon Bernthal, Graham Greene, Kelsey Asbille & Julia Jones round out the cast, all of whom deliver ernest and emotionally effecting performances.

Wind River is gripping from start to finish, 4.5/5.

The Anonymous Critic.