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DVD release/available to stream
After a young Native American woman is found murdered in the snow, a veteran tracker and FBI agent team up to find those responsible.
If you've seen the intense, atmospheric trailer for Wind River, you'll probably have experienced the same 'ooh, that looks good' feeling I did. However, be warned - the two or so minutes of the trailer are far better than watching the film itself, which actually turned out to be wholly unremarkable. After the discovery of the girl's frozen body (guess what? She's been brutally raped too!) and the introduction of new-in-town FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen, doing her best with an underwritten role), the film settles into the cliches that we're all so used to, from tracker Cory's (Jeremy Renner) traumatic past, to the estranged son battling a drug problem and the wizened police chief who's 'too old for this shit'. In a strange and somewhat ridiculous final showdown, there are more bodies laid out than in the final act of King Lear, which contrasts the slow tension that the film had been trying to build.
There a couple of striking images (including an alarming depiction of self harm) and some sweeping shots of the snowy, threatening landscape, but after scratching away the surface, Wind River adds nothing new to the thriller genre. Characters frequently reference how the landscape has impacted them, but the foreboding, threatening nature of the terrain is never given the screen time for us to feel the effect and understand the emotional plight the people living there face. It's a shame, as the frosty peaks and thick forests seem far more interesting than the human characters themselves. Jeremy Renner's role, Cory, lurches from hardened tracker and lion hunter to emotional therapist and philosophical fountain of knowledge as and when the story requires, whilst Elizabeth Olsen's tough FBI agent is undermined from the beginning after the camera rests upon her underwear-clad bottom in her very first scene.
With two solid leads heading up the cast, Wind River nonetheless fails to achieve or add anything fresh or original to the thriller catalogue. Falling into tried-and-tested cliches, it never builds the tension or threat it was aiming for, resulting in a passably entertaining flick that failed to evoke any sort of emotional connection or sense of dread.
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