While it has not yet topped KPop Demon Hunters, the immortal Netflix original hit, there’s a new movie riding high on Netflix’s top 10 list, and I would consider it one of the best murder mysteries of the past decade, having been released in 2017.
That would be Wind River, the Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen murder mystery that scored an 87% from 250 critics and a 90% from 25,000 viewers on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s very good. Here’s the synopsis, and a content warning follows:
“Cory Lambert is a wildlife officer who finds the body of an 18-year-old woman on an American Indian reservation in snowy Wyoming. When the autopsy reveals that she was raped, FBI agent Jane Banner arrives to investigate. Teaming up with Lambert as a guide, the duo soon find that their lives are in danger while trying to solve the mystery of the teen’s death.”
The film was released during Renner’s tenure as Hawkeye in the MCU, with him stepping away from that universe to make that (and also the thoroughly excellent Arrival around the same time). The same goes for Elizabeth Olsen who was also in the MCU at the same time back in 2017 as Wanda Maximoff, albeit before her solo feature WandaVision in 2021.
Perhaps most interestingly, and least known, is that this movie was written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, the creator of the megahit Yellowstone, and this movie came out right before it premiered in 2018 and blew up into one of the most-watched shows on TV. Taylor Sheridan was also launched into being a showrunner, director and/or writer for a huge number of projects for Paramount, Mayor of Kingstown (starring Renner), Tulsa King, 1883, 1923, Lioness and Landman, and has a stunning 10 upcoming projects in the works, supposedly, including more Yellowstone universe follow-ups like The Madison. But if you go way, way back, Sheridan got his start writing none other than Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario. So through all this, you can see why he’s become one of the most successful men in Hollywood.
Wind River does not have the “recently added” badge on Netflix, but that’s just because it came out right before September, rather than with the batch of new movies released on September 1. It has gone on and off Netflix over the years, but it’s back for some amount of time now, and it’s time to watch it if you haven’t. I would argue that the best murder mysteries these days are almost exclusively TV shows or miniseries, and there are just not all that many movies on par with Wind River. You are missing out if you don’t check it out.
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