Wind River movie review & film summary (2017)

“Wind River” is full of vast, scrubby expanses that give way to pristine blankets of white, interrupted only by a snowmobile slashing a solitary path. You can hear the crunch of snow and feel the bitter chill, which runs so deep that it can be deadly. Sheridan drops us in and we know this place immediately; his storytelling is meaty but efficient, and his pacing moves along at a steadily engrossing clip before ultimately exploding in a startling blast of violence.

A moody procedural, “Wind River” is heavy with symbolism from the start—perhaps, too much so. When we first see Jeremy Renner’s Cory Lambert, a tracker well-versed in the Wyoming wilds, he’s lying on his belly in the snow, camouflaged with his rifle, picking off wolves that have been preying on sheep. He’s a protector because it’s his job, but as we learn throughout the course of the film, that calling has become deeply personal.

There’s specificity to the way the characters talk, a poetry that can be quite moving or it can clang on the ear. But Sheridan’s script can be just as powerful in its quiet moments like these—in what the characters don’t say to each other.

On one of Cory’s hunting expeditions, he comes across the frozen body of a young woman; we’d seen her at the film’s start, frantically running barefoot in the middle of the night under a crisp, full moon. He recognizes her as Natalie (Kelsey Asbille), the best friend of his teenage daughter, who also died mysteriously a few years earlier.

Since the death occurred on the Wind River reservation—and Natalie, like Cory’s daughter, was Native American—the tribal police get involved in the investigation, led by the great Graham Greene as the dryly humorous, no-nonsense chief. But so, too, do the feds, in the form of newbie FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen). She’s been sent from the Las Vegas office and is so ill-equipped for this place and this weather that she has to borrow snow gear—from the closet of Cory’s late daughter, which adds to the prevailing sense of grief.

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