Wind River - SPOILERS

Rating: 8/10 (20 September 2017)

One of my favourite movie of the year so far, not that I've watched that many to be honest but still.
Wind river is a dark, gritty and at times contemplative polar that does not refrain to show violence and brutality to tell its story. The violence didn't feel gratuitous though, on the contrary, it served the story, the character and plot development.
I really enjoyed the performance of Jeremy Renner but the character is not an expressive one, meaning that except for maybe two or three moments, it doesn't really let the actor shine in my opinion. I also loved the performance of Elizabeth Olsen, especially since contrary to him, her characters displays a good range of emotions and she nails it. More importantly, and I'm not really sure why, but I felt that the relationship between the two characters worked really well. It is kinda surprising because they do not share that many things or have a lot of deep emotional moments but you can definitely tell that there truly is a bound that slowly grows between them. I think it may simply comes from the fact that they "see" each other and they come to have a deep respect from one another as two decent human beings that wanna solve a dreadful case. The overall atmosphere of the film felt great to me even though I'd say that it's still very dark at times. The scene where you see before you what really happened that night was not easy to watch, especially since you more or less know what's gonna happen. The fact they all die in the end doesn't take away from how despicable and vile what they did so I didn't even feel good about the resolution.
And that's where my main and only issue with this movie comes from. I see the unfolding of the events that transpired as not very coherent or at least I would have needed the writers to tell me a bit more about those guys and how things got so far and dark so fast. You can obviously see that the overly drunk guy is mean, up to no good and his buddies don't look too clever either. But that doesn't fully explain how they suddenly decide to beat their coworker and probably buddy to death, rape the girl and go back to work the next day. The second big issue is how they handle what happened. So, they beat their coworker to death, leave a girl to die somewhere in the snow, act like nothing ever happened, wait for a police team to come knock on the door, ambush them and kill them all... Like, REALLY ? I get that they're not the smartest bunch but even if they'd manage to survive, kill all the police team, one FBI agent of whom they are absolutely aware of the rank, what next ??? That part doesn't make sense to me.
What would have made more sense in my eyes is if they had accidentally killed or hurt very badly their coworker during a stupid fight, decided to hide it by killing them both and be the absolute vile human beings that they are by raping the girl. For the shootout, I think the whole scene should have been scratched and the writers could have found some other way for the law enforcement to go after them because as it is, it really looks like these guys think they'd be able to get away with the death of 1 civilian, 1 coworker, a bunch of police officers and one fbi agent which is delusional.
Anyway, it doesn't take that much away from my overall enjoyment of the film because it is very solid and many other aspects.
Final verdict: 8/10. This rating is not an attempt to evaluate the actual value of the film but merely reflects my own appreciation of it.