Allegorical mystery thriller makes for a haunting experience

Rating: 8/10 (1 November 2017)

Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan's directorial debut is a rather bleak affair that mixes murder mystery with the modern day western, set in a frozen landscape where cowboys and indians still roam, only now as long-forgotten ghosts. And the war between them still rages on.
Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen enjoy a naturalistic and believable dynamic together, perhaps thanks to their previous working collaborations, and the usual mismatched partners at odds clichés are immediately done away with by establishing both characters as professional, capable and cooperative. While this is a refreshing spin on a familiar trope, their relationship does lack a degree of conflict and drama. Renner's tracker has a sad backstory so he's all good for character depth, but Olsen's FBI agent is pretty much a mystery. We never learn much about her as a person or her past, which is a shame because she is utterly compelling in the role, projecting equal parts vulnerability and intensity. The whole cast feels authentic and natural and helps to really sell this world of an Indian reservation buried in ice and blood. Perhaps more time could have been spent exploring these people in greater depth. I would have gladly watched an extra 10-15 minutes of this story, just to get to know everyone better and feel more invested in them.
What is most commendable about Sheridan's muscular plotting is that it feels like a genuine investigation unfolding. There is nothing staged or contrived about it, even when we get a sharp stab of action. He also engineers a very slick third act reveal and transition to help us better understand events in context without the need for someone to monologue out some exposition of the hows, whys and whos. Once we finally get a clearer (and highly disturbing) picture of what happened, the metaphor that Sheridan's narrative is trying to embody becomes apparent and that the young woman's death at the start is analogous to the rape and murder of an entire culture, left to drown in its own blood in the middle of nowhere. With films about the Native American experience (and modern America's historical guilt complex), the solution to the case was perhaps an obvious and inevitable revelation, but still effective as allegory. For me, it is a message that would have been rendered far more powerful had Renner's character been written to be an actual Native American, something I suspect that Sheridan may have originally intended.
'Wind River' matches the unforgiving weather it portrays, much in the same way the atmospherics in Denis Villeneuve's tonally similar 'Prisoners' reflected the mindset of its characters and themes of its story. The beautiful snowy landscapes and crisp cinematography really help to sell this desolate frontier feeling, while the haunting score evokes an air of foreboding as well as a sense of loss. There are some minor gripes here but this is strong and solid storytelling that marks a promising debut for Sheridan in the director's chair.