Taylor Sheridan is to thank, director and writer (and only his second-directed film to date). He is the genius behind Sicario and last year's Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water. This could debatably be his strongest film to date. What his movies have done so well is placing wounded characters in the most desperate of situations, and then sitting back and watching them use skill to work their way out. This film opens with a solitary shot of a woman trudging her way through a snowy tundra on foot in the dead of night. She falls to the ground, coughs up blood, and later we learn she dies just a few yards away. This is the victim. The rest of the movie seeks to find out what led her to this situation.
We meet Cory (Jeremy Renner), who is a for-hire hunter who protects farms from wolves and various predators who feed on the livestock. During one hunt, he stumbles upon the body of an 18-year old girl, frozen in the snow. By his reckoning she had run 6 miles barefoot before dying at this spot. Cory knew the girl. "She was a fighter." The local tribe police Chief Ben (Graham Greene) gets involved, and we come to understand the Native American community here: small, first-name basis, impoverished, lost... As the body has evidence of rape, the FBI is called in. We meet Jane (Elizabeth Olsen), driving through the snow and dressed for a light fall day. She's fresh from Las Vegas, the "closest field agent" the agency could spare to investigate. Where Cory is surprised that this is what the federal government would provide, Ben is indifferent. When you have only a handful of cops to patrol a reservation the size of Rhode Island, you learn not to expect much.
Jane is an apt officer, wants justice for the victim, and yet receives no additional support since the coroner won't declare the death as a "homocide." The cause of death was simply the freezing of the victim's lungs, leading her to drown in her own blood. Jane is disheartened, but she teams up with Cory to sift through the evidence, tracks, and girl's family to try and determine the killers before being sent back to Las Vegas (or the snow melts).
Even as I write this synopsis it does nothing to capture the power of Sheridan's work. This isn't a buddy-buddy cop movie that finds a smoking gun and confronts the killer in an intense shoot-out, this is a human drama that reflects the way wounded souls are learning to cope. Through her talkings with Cory, Jane learns that he had a daughter who was also murdered and died under similar circumstances. This new investigation becomes a way for Cory to protect the legacy of his recently-deceased daughter. We learn about Jane (but only slightly), her reclusiveness, her steadfastness, and her strong search for justice. It is interesting to see these two characters interact when Cory has such a thorough backstory and Jane has next to none. We come to like both of them for different reasons, root for Jane in her strong heroism and calm in the face of grave danger, and respect Cory for his quiet demeanor and hands-on skills for observation and tracking.
The movie is filled with beautiful performances (Renner is surely doing his best work, and Olsen is a bonafide star brimming with raw talent) but the most affecting is that of the victim's father, Martin (Gil Birmingham), a Comanche actor that I was only familiar with from the TV comedy "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." This is a wounded man, protecting his manliness with a strong front, but broken just under the surface. His wife mourns openly by cutting herself and sobbing in the bedroom, while Martin only reveals his true feelings to Cory (perhaps because this is the only man who can understand his pain). Birmingham has only 2 scenes in the film, but the final moments between he and Renner are electric.
The movie does conclude on a satisfying note at the surface level in which the killer is determined and he is made to suffer. That's not even the important aspect of this movie. In fact to finally see retribution brought down only makes us ponder how senseless killing is at all. For these men of the wilderness, justice isn't dealt with through prison sentences (one character even says that prison is a "right of passage" for Native American boys in this country), it's still carried out swiftly as you might expect in an old western. The only difference here is that the consequences are just as heavy, and death only brings a life sentence for those who are left to deal with it. Jane, the strong woman in the film who thought she could bring sound logic and law to the place, concludes the film in a fury of tears and remorse, reflecting on the evils of men and her utter lack of knowledge for these people, just a state border away and yet a culture never to be understood.
This isn't a movie that pins Native Americans against the rest, nor does it seek to pity a culture that has retreated into slums and forgotten reservations. It simply wants the audience to know. The ending titles will tell you a story that I don't think anyone knew. It's a shock to the system. Over a quiet image of two men sitting together, Sheridan concludes his movie with a reflective calm and fitting fade out. Watch the movie and see for yourself.
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