“How do you gauge someone’s will to live?” asks Jeremy Renner’s Cory, a cowboy hunter living among the snow and silence of rural Wyoming’s permanent winter. Named after an Indian reservation of the same name, Wind River is the place where the corpse of a young Native American girl (Kelsey Asbille) is found, barefoot and frozen solid. With the help of FBI agent and Florida native Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), Cory tries to figure out what – or who – she was running from. Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan (who wrote the screenplays for Sicario and Hell Or High Water), Wild River is a violent, tense thriller, sparse and well paced, from its chilling, moonlit opening to a nerve-shredding episode in a dilapidated house that recalls Clarice’s standoff with Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. Renner is on good form here (and rocking a hard-to-pull-off pair of dungarees) as the sensitive, protective Cory, and as a genre exercise, it works.
However, for a film whose closing title card explicitly marks it as a project concerned with the rape and colonial injustice suffered by Native Americans, it spends a lot of time with intervening white people. It’s more effective when it doesn’t try so hard and addresses existential themes, rather than political ones, such as the burden of grief and the tough, isolating reality of Wyoming’s frozen expanse.
