Review: Wind River (15)

Taylor Sheridan follows up his acclaimed screenplays for David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water and Denis Villeneuve's Sicario with his directorial debut.
PARTNERS: Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner in Wind River.PARTNERS: Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner in Wind River.
PARTNERS: Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner in Wind River.

Like his scripts for those films, Wind River is another muscular, modern-day western, full of tense action and tough, taciturn characters trying to navigate life on the fringes of America. Set on a Native American reservation that’s been left to its own devices with none of the infrastructure necessary to let its inhabitants thrive, the film opens with the death of a young woman.

Discovered in the frozen wilds of Wyoming’s Wind River reservation, she’s found and identified by Jeremy Renner’s Cory Lambert, a game tracker with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. He knows the girl, knows her family, knows that something horrifying must have forced this Native American teenager to run barefoot through the night until her lungs packed up. Young FBI agent, Elizabeth Olsen’s Jane, arrives on the scene from Las Vegas, woefully unprepared for the extremes of Wyoming in winter and knows she’s out of her depth right away and recruits Lambert to help her investigate her death.

Renner burrows deep into his character with an empathetic turn and Olsen too does good work, her character’s resolve never obscured by her vulnerability.