WIND RIVER
I love everything about Westerns—from the story structure to the landscapes and the atmosphere. And these days, nobody makes a Western quite like Taylor Sheridan. The first two films he wrote, HELL OR HIGH WATER and SICARIO, are undeniable. HELL OR HIGH WATER is an action-packed and powerful heist film in the remote landscape of West Texas, and SICARIO’s border crossing scene (IYKYK) will be burned into my brain forever. But I want to talk about his third, less talked-about film, which he also directed. WIND RIVER (trailer here) follows animal tracker Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner) as he assists rookie FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) in solving a rape and murder case involving a teenage girl. It’s set against the backdrop of Wind River, the only Native American reservation in Wyoming (a real place, home to the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho tribes). Powered by a strong cast of Native American actors including Kelsey Asbille and Gil Birmingham (both went on to work on Sheridan’s YELLOWSTONE), the film doesn’t shy away from the harsh realities of life on many reservations. Because in reality, most cases like the one in the film go unsolved (and as the film points out in its closing “while missing person statistics are compiled for every other demographic, none exist for Native American women”). While there are definitely parts of this subject that could have been further explored, WIND RIVER is an engrossing yet somber slow-burn crime thriller that I can’t recommend enough.
—Jackson Ingraham, Executive Assistant
