Wind River Review

Taylor Sheridan directs his own script for the first time and lets the landscape do half the work. Ben Richardson shoots the reservation as an unbroken white field where distance itself is the antagonist, and the film is honest that the cold kills people the law never bothers to count. Jeremy Renner gives the best performance of his career as a tracker who reads snow like a page and names his own grief exactly once.

Gil Birmingham has two scenes and takes the picture with them, particularly a father sitting in face paint he admits he invented because nobody was left to teach him the real thing. The standoff at the drilling camp is staged with enough patience that the violence, when it arrives, is shocking rather than exciting. What holds it back is the outsider and the sermons.

Elizabeth Olsen's rookie agent exists largely to be told things, and Sheridan's habit of stopping a scene so a character can deliver a paragraph about luck and pain is visible every single time he does it. The closing card about missing Indigenous women is the reason the film exists, and the ninety minutes before it earn the right to put it up.