Review of Wind River (2017) by Chris O — 17 May 2018

An amazingly written and haunting film that does everything right.

WIND RIVER is a chilling thriller that follows a rookie FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) who teams up with a local game tracker with deep community ties and a haunted past (Jeremy Renner) to investigate the murder of a local girl on a remote Native American Reservation in the hopes of solving her mysterious death.

It disappoints me how long it took for me to watch this film. I missed it in theaters and even though I've had it on Blu-Ray, I hadn't sat down to watch it until recently. And boy was I missing out because not only did I love this film, but it was so amazing that it would've been one of my favorite films of last year.

To start off, I'm just going to say that this film is the perfect example of what a great film should do. The dialogue scenes here were so well written and perfect in every way. They never gave away too much but there was so much importance and character in each interaction that it made it so valuable. The story arc and the entire structure was perfectly well balanced and the pacing was so on point. I would love to meet the writer of this film and learn from them because I genuinely admired the way this film was written. Even if I didn't like the film, the script is an objectively, well written script.

I thought Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen were both fantastic as leads. Seeing them in slightly different roles then we're used to was invigorating. These guys, along with others, really carried the show. And while these two were great, I thought the cast was fantastic all the way down the ladder. I thought everyone filled their roles perfectly and I wouldn't have picked a different cast for anyone here.

Overall, "Wind River" is this dramatic, really horrifying thriller. It did a lot of brilliant methods of filmmaking that I didn't expect prior to watching it and I was in awe. I was literally left speechless throughout this film and I was constantly on edge. There are some scenes that are still stuck in my head and for good reason. This film did so many great things that I just don't know how to justify how it made me feel. I felt sad and attached throughout and I couldn't take my eyes off.

In the end, "Wind River" was an amazing film and one of the best films of 2017. I'm pretty positive it's on Netflix so I recommend this film to those of you reading this, as long as you know what you're getting into.