Graham Greene, Elizabeth Olsen appear with Jeremy Renner in Taylor Sheridan’s prize-winning drama.
Coming soon to a theater near you: Wind River, a powerful drama about a murder investigation on a Native American reservation, starring Jeremy Renner as a game tracker with deep community ties and a haunted past who joins forces with a rookie FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) and the local tribal police chief (Graham Greene) to find the killer of a young woman whose body he discovered in a remote area. Gil Birmingham co-stars as Martin Hanson, the anguished father of the victim, and Martin Sensmeier plays Chip Hanson, Martin’s estranged son. The movie marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, who received an Oscar nomination for writing Hell or High Water.
Wind River had its world premiere last January at the Sundance Film Festival, where Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy hailed it for offering “shrewd insights into troubling American social issues in a punchy, action-and-violence-filled package. Centered on the rape and murder of a teenage girl on an impoverished Indian reservation in Wyoming, the film yanks the viewer to attention with its keen sensitivity to the rough winter conditions and limited prospects faced by the locals.” Variety critic Owen Gleiberman gave high praise to Sheridan, noting that the writer-director “possesses a fully scaled vision of our society, and of what’s gone wrong in it. He’s drawn to men of violence on both sides of the law, and to the intricacies of crime, but what he’s really drawn to is depicting those things as an expression of our inner hunger. He’s a bristling entertainer with the soul of a noir poet.”
Sheridan received the Un Certain Regard award for Best Director when Wind River was screened in May at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, and subsequently was lauded at the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and the Nantucket Film Festival.
