"She ran six miles barefoot in the snow and died of frozen burst lungs ..."

Rating: 8/10 (30 July 2017)

A female FBI agent teams with a veteran game tracker to investigate a bizarre murder on a remote Indian reservation. Director Taylor Sheridan. Stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen as the FBI agent. Viewed at Cannes, 2017, where it won the Best director award in the Un Certain Regard sector.
Rape and murder on the reservation with Jeremy Renner really coming into his own as a not particularly handsome leading man. Very strong as the predator hunter with high powered rifle on high speed snowmobile. The picture opens with a long sequence of a woman running barefoot across a vast nighttime snowscape until she finally drops dead. Eventually we will find out that she was brutally gang raped and was fleeing for her life. Reservation great white hunter, Renner, starts an informal investigation on his own. An FBI agent, (Olsen) is called in to assist with the investigation. A junior woman agent is all the FBI cares to spare for this case, obviously regarded as unimportant because who. cares about Indians! But, since only the FBI has police authority on Indian reservation territory they have to make at least a token contribution to the investigation
At the end of this snowy subzero nail biter, Renner having tracked down the main rapist subjects the now wounded and fleeing central SOB to a most satisfying form of vigilante justice -- making him crawl on his belly bloodied and barefoot in the snow to a hideous painfully slow death -- the same kind of death the multiple rape victim at the beginning had to endure. The fetching female FBI agent called in on the case (Elizabeth Olsen) provides a slightly romantic angle to an otherwise edgy all male Indian reservation thriller. Beautiful snowy mountain photography throughout is more than noteworthy. Overall one of the best films of the Cannes week.
Kudos to director Taylor Sheridan and all others involved in this remarkable outdoor production. This Weinstein brothers prod was filmed in Utah although the setting is supposedly Wyoming on the Wind River Reservation. An added reality perk, real Indians, not Hollywood palefaces, portray the Native American characters. And do it so well!
The Wind River Indian Reservation is an Indian reservation for the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes of Native Americans in the central western portion of the U.S. state of Wyoming. The entrance to the Wind River Reservation is the small town of Lander, Wyo. which is actually seen in one brief scene, but the magnificent mountain snowscapes we see are all in Utah. Geographical poetic license. Highly recommended off-beat scenic thriller with highly satisfying retribution at the end.