True Detective Meets Fargo In Taylor Sheridan's Forgotten Western Movie Gem On Netflix
There is a forgotten Taylor Sheridan available to stream on Netflix right now, and it is a movie that deserves a lot more love. Sheridan remains best known for his universe of television shows that almost exclusively aired on Paramount, with titles like Yellowstone, 1883, Landman, and The Madison as his best of the best. However, before he got his start on television, he was writing and starring in movies, including his major breakout with the thriller Sicario in 2015.
Two years after writing Sicario and one year before Yellowstone launched on Paramount, Sheridan directed the second movie of his career, Wind River. Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen star in the movie, coming off their roles in the MCU, where they played Hawkeye and the Scarlet Witch. The plot follows a young Native American woman found barefoot and dead in the harsh, snowy Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.
The movie, a neo-Western murder mystery, was a decent box office success when released, and it received overwhelmingly positive reviews, but it remains overshadowed by Sheridan's later movies. Sheridan remains best known for his television work, even with movies like Sicario and Hell or High Water in his past, but Wind River deserves a lot more love.
How Taylor Sheridan's Wind River Blends Fargo, True Detective & More
Wind River shares a lot in common with better-known movies, including Fargo, and TV shows like True Detective. The murder takes place in a consistently snowy landscape in the northern United States, and Wyoming might be as bad as the Minnesota depicted in Fargo. Take the snowy landscape of the setting and add in the brutal murder mystery that is reminiscent of True Detective to get its full effect.
The movie has the mystery of the dead young Native American woman and the mismatched detectives in Renner's experienced U.S. Fish and Wildlife tracker and Olsen's FBI agent, someone with little knowledge of this terrain. This adds in the themes from Sheridan's own Sicario, which saw a young FBI special agent teaming with a former Mexican prosecutor turned assassin with U.S. government connections.
However, there is a lot more under the hood of Wind River than just comparing it to other movies and TV shows.
Wind River Is An Underrated Taylor Sheridan Release
While it doesn't get the same love as Sicario or Hell or High Water, Wind River is the more important movie. Sheridan wrote the movie to shine a light on the high number of unsolved rapes and murders of indigenous women, both on and off reservations. Sheridan even added a title card at the end of the movie that said missing person statistics are compiled for every demographic except for Native American women.
Activists have attempted to raise awareness of the connection between sex trafficking, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and the women and girls who go missing and are murdered. One thing that Sheridan wanted to do with his movie was to tell the story about a woman who is not unlike the unknown total of indigenous women who are murdered in North America every year.
Taylor Sheridan Should Direct More Movies Like Wind River
It's been five years since Sheridan directed a movie, and that last directorial effort is the action thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead. That movie, based on the novel by Michael Koryta, follows a young boy who witnesses his father's murder and who goes on the run with a smokejumper played by Angelina Jolie into the Montana wilderness. Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen star as the assassins chasing the boy.
Before this, Sheridan's only other films as a director were Wind River and Vile, which was his feature debut in 2011. Vile was also the only movie he directed but didn't write. Even his next movie, Capture the Flag, is one he is only writing and producing, and based on Wind River, he needs to be working on directing more movies in the future.
What's Happening With Wind River's Sequel?
A sequel shot was shot for Wind River, but it has still never been released. This movie was shot three years ago, and while Renner and Olsen did not return, and Sheridan didn't write or direct it, the movie remains shelved with no release date in sight. The movie is titled Wind River: The Next Chapter, and it brings back both Martin Sensmeier and Gil Birmingham as Chip and Martin Hanson.
According to Birmingham, Wind River 2 is more of a thriller movie and is very different from the original, but he said that it is also hard to lock into a specific genre. Jason Clarke, who also stars in the movie, said that it has been locked up with legalities, but there is hope it will arrive soon. Regardless, Wind River is on Netflix now, and it remains a movie that deserves to be remembered more than it is.