the best movie of its kind since Insomnia: a snow-bound tale of murder, dread and existential horrors

Rating: 8/10 (25 August 2017)

With Wind River, I'll get a nitpick out of the way first, There's in Wind River a mournful score (by none other than Nick Cave with Warren Ellis), and it gives scenes that would otherwise have a stock tone to them a sense of tragedy that isn't laying it on thick but is there and one you can feel in your bones, like being out there in the sort of cold that would give Marquis Warren in Hateful Eight some pause. The nitpick is with the voice in the score, this whispery male voice that is saying things as Jeremy Renner trudges through the snow or a character goes through a mysterious part of the woods. What is that? Why is he doing that? I feel like a grump for even bringing it up, but it took me out of the movie.
OK, what is this movie? Wind River is another Taylor Sheridan script, a man who has cut a' real figure in recent cinema making violent, brutal films with the sort of brutality that is about how people can be just awful creatures, and we all know it but somehow get subsumed in it. Wind River probably shares more of a kinship with Sicario, Sheridan's first produced script (here he directs for the first time), as it's almost as much about the setting and how it contributes to the discomfort.
Actually both movies also have a woman who *is* already a tough cookie and can do her job well (to the point where one should feel foolish even trying to equate her to a man, as if she's not good enough, and both Blunt and Olsen make these women such), while around men who have been shaped by the world around them... Come to think of it, there's also a male protagonist who has lost his family and has transformed him over time into something much harder. I could probably go on and on with the comparisons, including the unforgiving nature of the whole culture.
But while del Toro in Sicario was lost forever to his darkness, Renner's Cory is someone who still does have family - we see him with his son, still doing his best, though separated from his wife now (why this is is... one of those movie things, I can buy it, more due to the mother's pain as they both lost a daughter to some tragic circumstances) - and he has another job as a tracker. But that pain is always there, and internalized in a different way. He can be scary, but it's not in his immediate nature; he is a good person, but has been shaped by so much around him and has had to adapt. The girl in the middle of the plot of this story who is found dead, frozen, miles from the nearest place she could have been from (it's the sort of mystery that really isn't, and we know that, and it makes it sadder), has a father and of course he is devastated. When Cory offers up his consolation, it's genuine, and how Sheridan writes in and Renner plays it has all of the pain but grudging knowledge of what comes with... time.
Like Pine in 'High Water' last year, it's easy to take certain actors for granted - it's been a long time (maybe since The Hurt Locker? probably not Bourne Legacy I'd bet) that Renner has had any character to play that's challenged him, much less as a lead, and he sinks his actory teeth into this completely. He has Olsen to play off of too, and she does well, but the framing is really from his point of view; some may find more identification with her, as the one who is not from such a place as Wyoming. I found myself totally in Renner's point of view, and it made it a richer experience because of how every moment has a simplicity and truth to it. One of the pleasures of seeing movies for, well, grown ups that Hollywood does(ish) in a genre is to see actors not just getting to but allowed to show all the complexity they're capable of. I'll remember those scenes where Renner gets to really shine as the awesome actor he is (i.e. when he tells about his daughter to Olsen), but it's the quieter scenes that are tougher and that he does so well.
This isn't a pleasant experience inasmuch that you'll leave feeling elated or something. What makes Wind River stick out as being a very good film is that Sheridan isn't ostentatious about it. He has confidence in showing us all of this out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-ness and we get it, and he even finds quality in those scenes with characters that are only there so briefly (Jon Bernthal does pop up, but I won't tell you when or what his role is, for example). My favorite is the dead girl's brother, who is about the same age as her and a waste of life drug addict. But Sheridan does the work, even in several minutes of screen time, to get us to understand who he is, why he's come to this place, and that he's not very sympathetic (Renner's Cory helps make this clear). I don't even remember the actor's name, and he'll stay with me for a long time with that scene in the car at night. Sheridan's setting may seem or just be obvious as was the Mexican one - heat is oppressive and so is the cold, and, as we see, it can kill if one is not careful - but he stays true to what he's after, and when he goes into the dark parts of the human experience, it feels earned. If he's not quite to where Villeneuve is yet, he will be soon.
Just, you know, tell Nick Cave to cut out that voice s***.