Renner shines in this potent ‘film neige’

Wind River is a Native American reservation in the Wyoming wilderness – a place of “snow and silence”, as local game tracker Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), evocatively puts it. His words, like his wide hat and pistol, call to mind Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence and any number of other snowbound cowboy yarns – and at first, Taylor Sheridan’s film looks as if it may join their ranks.

But, for what’s being positioned as his “serious” directorial debut – a little-seen 2011 horror called Vile apparently doesn’t qualify – Sheridan has instead made what might be called a film neige: a noir in which narrow alleys and slinking fog have given way to ash-grey plains and groves of birch, but where loyalties are just as murky, and the bite of isolation just as fierce.

Like many noirs, it begins with a young woman in trouble. Natalie Hanson (Kelsey Asbille) runs for her life through the frozen wilds, and it’s Lambert who finds her body. One odd detail – she isn’t wearing shoes – gnaws at his mind, even as FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) is scrambled from Las Vegas. This slight young woman conspicuously does not belong – but Wind River is a film about the landscape’s hard indifference towards all who trudge across it – and Sheridan’s beady script scrutinises its characters’ credentials in turn.

Lambert, though he married a Native American woman (Julia Jones), is an obvious interloper – as are the men who live and work on an oil well on the mountainside. Even the Native Americans are corralled here: in the olden days, Lambert explains they used to migrate elsewhere in harsh winters. Now, they have to stay put. As such, it’s never quite clear who’s in charge, and this becomes one of the film’s tangiest sources of tension.

Renner gives his subtlest, most rivetingly individual performance in years, and Wind River confirms the director as a rising talent who can be trusted to beat his own enticing path through inhospitable ground.