Wind River (2017)

9.00pm, Wednesday, Film 4

“Man, I get so mad. I wanna ght the whole world” After writing Sicario and Hell or High Water (two cracking dramas), scriptwriter Taylor Sheridan completed his Frontier Trilogy by getting behind the camera for this bleak drama that received an eightminute standing ovation at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Based on a true story and set on the remote Wyoming frontier, Wind River stars Jeremy Renner as Cory, a local trapper and hunter called in to assist an FBI o cer, Jane (Elizabeth Olsen), when a young woman is found murdered on the Wind River Native American Reservation. “This isn’t the land of back-up, Jane,” he tells her. “This is the land of: ‘You’re on your own’.” Cory is keen to help since the girl in question was a close friend of his own teenage daughter who had been murdered in not too dissimilar circumstances, and his marriage has evaporated as a result.

Many of the characters in this broken landscape are leading lives of quiet desperation, but none is su ering as much as the Native American community, who are losing their young people to drugs, violence and poverty. While Sheridan’s directorial debut doesn’t entirely work as a murder mystery, it’s beautifully shot and features a career-high performance from Renner (who got the nod when Chris Pine nixed to take up Wonder Woman duties). Sheridan is too smart a lm-maker to lob in an unnecessary romance between his two leads: his focus is on frontiers, fatherhood and a disenfranchised community, and in this he succeeds splendidly.