Film Review: "Wind River" (2017).

"An engaging thriller from the writer of Sicario and Hell Or High Water and the producer of Lone Survivor" comes Wind River. This neo-Western murder mystery film written and directed by Taylor Sheridan. Cory Lambert is a wildlife officer who finds the body of an eighteen-year-old woman on an American Indian reservation in snowy Wyoming. When the autopsy reveals that she was raped, FBI agent Jane Banner arrives to investigate. Teaming up with Lambert as a guide, the duo soon find that their lives are in danger while trying to solve the mystery of the teen's death.

According to Sheridan, he was inspired to write the film because of the high number of sexual assault and/or murder against indigenous women. He wanted to make more people aware of this problem. During the course of the shoot, Sheridan was visited on set by some Shoshone tribal leaders who astonished him with the revelation that, at that very time, there were 12 unsolved murders of young women on a reservation of about six thousand people. Due to a 1978 landmark government ruling (Oliphant v. Suquamish), the Supreme Court stripped tribes of the right to arrest and prosecute non-natives who commit crimes on native land. If neither victim nor perpetrator are native, a county or state officer must make the arrest. If the perpetrator is non-native and the victim an enrolled member, only a federally-certified agent has that right. If the opposite is true, a tribal officer can make the arrest, but the case must still go to federal court. This quagmire creates a jurisdictional nightmare by choking up the legal process on reservations to such a degree, many criminals go unpunished indefinitely for serious crimes. In order to get attention for the movie so that Sheridan could get enough money to finish it in post production the way he wanted, he entered it into Sundance without telling his producers, who he says were not happy because they were trying to close a deal with TWC for the film. Nevertheless, that deal was eventually made. By early March 2016, Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Graham Greene, Jon Bernthal, Eric Lange, Gil Birmingham, Julia Jones, Martin Sensmeier, and Kelsey Chow were cast. At the same time, principal photography commenced, and wrapped in late April. Filming took place throughout Utah and Wyoming. The grueling location shoot was filmed in real blizzardy conditions with crew and equipment being primarily ferried to locations on snowmobiles and snowcats, since regular vehicles were totally unsuitable for the hazardous terrain.

The film stars Renner, Olsen, Greene, Bernthal, Lange, Birmingham, Jones, Sensmeier, and Chow. Strong performances were given by the cast, then there's Renner, who lurks about the fringes of the action for most of the story, and then springs into action in a handful of scenes in a variety of ways that will leave you shaken—and grateful to have seen such beautifully dark work

Led by outstanding work from Olsen and Renner, Wind River is a taut, tightly wound thriller with much more on its mind than attention-getting set pieces.

Simon says Wind River receives: