Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch on the Rez

I’m a fan of action movies like Wind River (2017), but Ms. Spenser is not, particularly. But she spent some time on an Indian reservation in Montana, and was open to watching this. It was also pretty far down on our queue, but Netflix just skipped a bunch of movies and sent it anyway. Well, times are funny.

It opens with a young woman running barefoot through the snow, while a poem is recited in voice over. Finally, she falls in the snow and lies still. We cut to Jeremy Renner, a Fish and Wildlife officer, hunting wolves. Then he goes to his ex-wife’s (Julia Jones) place to pick up their boy and take him to see his grandfather, an Indian who tells Renner he has seen lion tracks. When Renner goes to track the lion, he finds the body of the woman in the snow.

Graham Greene, the chief of the Tribal Police, needs to wait for the FBI to come and deal with the death, and Elizabeth Olsen shows up, fresh from the Las Vegas office in a light jacket. So cagey tracker Renner and novice Olsen will have to track down the murderer of this young woman. For Renner, it’s personal. His own daughter died in a similar manner, which is probably why he is divorced.

Director Taylor Sheridan made this movie based on several unsolved deaths of young women on reservations. Because of jurisdictional issues, most are barely investigated. Federal crimes on reservation land have to be investigated by the feds, who aren’t that motivated, and tribal police are understaffed and funded. The Wind River reservation, as portrayed here by Utah, is cold, beautiful, poor and deadly. The people seem to live pretty grim lives, even leaving murders aside.

The ending is violent, thought maybe a bit pat. Somewhere early on, someone says something like, “This case just solves itself.” And it pretty much does. But it takes a lot of killing to close the case. This is probably not a great date night movie.