An FBI agent is called in from Las Vegas: this is Jane Banner, played by Elizabeth Olsen. Here, the overstretched police force have been called to attend a crime scene: a young Native American woman, Natalie (Kelsey Asbille) has been found dead in the snow, with a head wound and evidence of sexual assault. The setting is the Wind River Indian reservation, a vast, wintry area of land in central Wyoming. We get country lore and the wearing of stetsons, and scenes with horses being treated with loving connoisseurship and respect, but also a gruesome autopsy, featuring a medical examiner looking faintly eccentric and blandly unshockable amid the gore in the time-honoured manner. There’s some Cormac McCarthy in here, and a tiny bit of Patricia Cornwell. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan – who scripted Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario and David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water – now makes his hyphenate debut as a writer-director with this gripping movie, muscular in its confidence and storytelling punch, the kind you could call a western forensic thriller.
That’s all.” With these agonised words in the movie’s dying minutes, a key character summarises its two ambient ideas: a deathly whiteout in the piercing cold and an oppressive quiet, far from the city’s bustle where help in a crisis might conceivably be at hand.
