Theatrical Review: Wind River (2017)

"It's movies like this that make us love movies."

Writer/Director Taylor Sheridan is best known to us for playing Deputy Hale on a little TV show that we loved called Sons of Anarchy.

Turns out that he's also one hell of a writer too, penning scripts for the excellent Sicario, and the even more excellent Hell or High Water, which was one of the best movies that we saw last year. He also directed a Horror flick called Vile back in 2011, so as far as we're concerned, he rocks.

Wind River marks the first time that he's directed something he's written, and it's maybe the best work he's done on any front.

Cody Lambert is an agent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. His days consists of shooting wolves and tracking hungry mountain lions, which keeps him in a bit of a somber mood. The fact that his daughter died a few years earlier, which helped destroy his marriage, probably doesn't help much either. And the bleak, snowy surroundings...

LIONS DON'T MAKE SNOW ANGELS... DO THEY?

When he finds the barefoot body of a local girl out in the wild, things get even bleaker. The girl was best friends with his daughter, and so old wounds mix with new pain to make Cody even more quiet and somber than he normally is, which even for the backwoods of Wyoming, is way too much.

HE'S SEEN SOME SHIT.

With no one knowing the local terrain better than Cody, it falls to him to help a rookie FBI agent track the killer down and bring him (her, them?) to justice. It also falls to him, by way of a promise to the dead girl's father, to kill the son of a bitch when they find him, so you just know it's all going to end with bloodshed.

LOTS OF BLOODSHED.

Where we expected Wind River to be a Serial Killer flick, we instead got a murder mystery wrapped in an emotional blanket of social relevance and heartbreak, and we couldn't be happier about it.

This is a stark and desolate movie that gives us real characters acting in ways that didn't once make them feel like they were characters in a movie. That makes the emotional weight of everything that unfolds around them that much heavier, and as the intensity grows, which it does, we couldn't help but be on the edge of our seat not only wondering what they'd find, but what would happen to them in the process.

We loved the sub-plot with the lion, and the climactic scene at the end was crazy intense, giving us a perfect resolution.

Jeremy Renner turns in what I think is an Oscar-worthy performance as a quiet, broken man who is tasked with finding the killer of a young girl, and every step of his journey shows that he's as adept at his job as he is isolated from everything else in his life. He's a bad-ass, but he's also very human, which made his badassery play even better. He killed us in this one.

Equally as good, but in a different and lesser way, was Elizabeth Olsen as the rookie FBI agent sent to find the killer in the wilds of Wyoming. She's in over her head, but she goes full bore in her pursuit of the killer, especially once she is sucked in by the emotion of the case, and the people involved.

The two of them have great on-screen chemistry, and they both shine in this one. 

LIFE IN WYOMING IS TOUGH.

 She's way too hot to be an FBI agent.

COME ON!

The statistic about Native American women shown at the end is horrifying.

“While missing person statistics are compiled for every other demographic, none exist for Native American women.”

Taylor Sheridan had two attorneys spend three month's trying to compile statistics on the subject but to no avail, because "No one knows how many there are." Shame on us.

THEY DESERVE BETTER.

The violence in this movie isn't gratuitous at all, but it's there towards the end.

WHO WOULD DARE BLOODY THAT ANGEL'S CHEEK?

Aside from a quick shot of some underwear, this in not that kind of movie.

THERE'S NO TAWDRY SEX OR NUDITY IN THIS ONE, ONLY LOVE. SWEET, TRAGIC, FORBIDDEN LOVE.

This movie is filled with some truly fantastic dialogue. The speech that Jeremy Renner gives about pain was special.

Also, "You really didn't see it, did you?" and "He went out with a whimper."

"SAY THAT SHIT AGAIN, YOU HALF-ASSED JASON BOURNE!" WAS A GOOD ONE TOO.

Calling Wind River the best movie of 2017 is a bold claim, I know, but honestly, no other movie that we've seen so far this year has affected us quite like this one did.

Wind River is an excellent movie from start to finish. Its script is air-tight, it has cold and deary atmosphere to spare, and the cast is top-notch. It's one of the most engaging thrillers that we've seen in a long time, which is saying something given how sparse and quiet it is overall.

See it on the big screen.

A+

Wind River is in theaters now.

The traumatized beauties of Wind River.