Film

Wind River

Name: Wind River
Genre: Crime, Mystery, Thriller
Released: 2017
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Gil Birmingham, Graham Greene, Jon Bernthal

A bleak, beautifully shot neo-western about a Fish and Wildlife tracker pulled into investigating a young woman's death on a Wyoming reservation. Taylor Sheridan directs with the same unhurried dread as his scripts for Sicario and Hell or High Water — this is grief and violence rendered plainly, without spectacle. Devastating, unglamorous, and quietly furious about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women it's built around.

TMDb rating

7.4

If you liked this

Hell or High Water2016

Same writer, same dust-blown moral universe—two brothers robbing banks and a weary Texas Ranger closing in, all shot through with the same tired, righteous sadness that makes Wind River sing.

But It swaps snow for scorched plains, and its violence lands with more dark humour than the grief Wind River sits in.

Sicario2015

Sheridan again, this time on the US-Mexico border—Emily Blunt's idealistic agent gets pulled into a war with no rules, shot with the same slow dread and moral exhaustion.

But It trades Wind River's intimate grief for geopolitical scale, and its ending offers even less comfort or resolution.

Yellowstone2018

Sheridan's own sprawling follow-up, trading one crime for a whole family's war over land, with the same weathered landscapes and quiet fury about who gets to belong where.

But It's a soap at heart, five seasons of family melodrama where Wind River gave you two tight, unforgiving hours.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Smoke Signals1998

Wind River asks an outsider to make sense of reservation grief; this film shows what that grief and joy look like from inside the community, decades before the term "MMIW" had traction.

A father-and-son road trip across reservation and interstate, funny and tender, written and directed by Native American filmmakers telling their own story instead of being investigated by one.

But It's gentle where Wind River is grim; nothing here builds toward a body in the snow.

Longmire2012

A Wyoming sheriff working cases that keep crossing onto reservation land, with the same unglamorous procedural patience and respect for Native characters as more than scenery.

But The mysteries are gentler, more comfort-watch than Wind River's raw nerve, and six seasons is a big ask.

True Detective2014

Two mismatched investigators, one crime that reaches into a community's deepest wounds, and a landscape—Louisiana instead of Wyoming—that feels just as much a character.

But It's stylised and philosophical where Wind River stays plain-spoken; the swagger can outrun the sorrow.

Frozen River2008

A tiny, unglamorous thriller about two women—one white, one Mohawk—smuggling across a frozen river to survive, with the same clear eye on poverty and reservation life.

But It's low-budget and quiet where Wind River is polished and propulsive; the tension builds much slower.

No Country for Old Men2007

The Coens' bleak West Texas chase has the same vast, indifferent landscape and the same sense that violence here is just weather, unstoppable and impersonal.

But It's colder and more nihilistic, with a shaggier structure and an ending that refuses every satisfaction Wind River still offers.

Mystic River2003

A murder tears open old wounds in a working-class community, and the film cares more about grief's aftershocks than about solving anything cleanly.

But Boston asphalt instead of Wyoming snow, and its tragedy plays more like Greek chorus than manhunt.

The Revenant2015

If it's the punishing cold and a man's grief-fuelled reckoning with a wilderness that doesn't care whether he lives that hooked you, this delivers both at feature length and then some.

But It's more survival epic than mystery, with almost no plot beyond endurance and revenge.

The Exiles1961no page yet

Made decades before Sheridan's film, by people documenting their own displaced community rather than a sheriff's-eye view of it—the same ache, told without a white protagonist to translate it.

A hypnotic, black-and-white record of one night among young Native Americans adrift in 1950s Los Angeles, shot almost like a documentary, aching with a loneliness no plot resolves.

But There's barely a story—atmosphere and faces carry it, and the pacing is a world away from a thriller.

Insomnia1997no page yet

Same frontier-town isolation and a lawman's conscience eaten alive by what the landscape hides—just swap Wyoming snow for a sun that never sets.

A detective investigating a murder in the Arctic circle starts unraveling under guilt and endless daylight instead of endless dark, a Nordic noir with the same frozen moral rot.

But Subtitled and slower-burning, and it centers a corrupt investigator rather than a righteous one.