Murder mystery 'Wind River' a thoughtful, less-exciting police procedural

Don't expect "Wind River" to pack the crackling tension and startling revelations of "Sicario," or even the intellectual clash of wills of "Hell or High Water."

All three layered thrillers come from screenwriter Taylor Sheridan, who makes a more-than-auspicous directorial debut with "Wind River," a murder mystery more interested in thoughtful examinations of damaged humanity than in the execution of adrenaline rushes.

"Wind River" begins with a panicked, bleeding Native American woman running, falling and crawling through the subzero snows of Wyoming late at night.

Days later, wildlife officer Corey Lambert - an unusually subdued and weary Jeremy Renner - discovers the body of 18-year-old Natalie (Kelsey Asbille) on the Wind River Reservation. She had been raped. She ran so hard that her lungs exploded from the subzero air she took in. It looks like a homicide.

The elder tribal police chief Ben (Graham Greene) investigates. The FBI sends a single agent, a rookie named Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen, resembling Emily Blunt in "Sicario") to determine what happened. The unseasoned Banner knows little about the Native Americans.

And she's a female in a place that we soon discover harbors a disturbing acceptance of rape culture.

Unlike in most Hollywood movies where she would be the comically incompetent outsider, Banner's smart. She recognizes Lambert's superior tracking and critical thinking skills, and she asks for his help on the case.

When guns get drawn, she demonstrates strobe light reflexes, the result of obvious discipline and training. People in this movie are more than they first let on.

Sheridan crafts "Wind River" as a classic police procedural, a murder mystery thinly masking an expose on a failed experiment called the Native American Reservation, a place where hope and dreams wither and die.

Sheridan showcased the greed and violence along the Mexican border in "Sicario." He made the chasm between the haves and have-nots the foundation for the West Texas bank robberies in "Hell or High Water."

"Wind River" shows us how the isolation and abandonment of Native Americans have created an inhospitable climate rife with drugs, despair, booze and a harsh return to the laws of nature, not of civilized humans.

Lambert himself shares a terrible, personal connection to Natalie's father, Martin (a galvanizingly magnetic Gil Birmingham, co-star of "Hell or High Water"). Lambert's own daughter succumbed to a similar fate, and the two wounded fathers, one Native American, one white, share an unspoken, primal bond of pain and loss.

As a director, Sheridan demonstrates a grand potential for creating provocative, original works, although late in "Wind River," he channels Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" in an awkward Mexican-standoff scene that does not end well.

Renner and Sheridan give us a modern cowboy for the movies, a sad and decent man stripped of life's illusions, a kind soul trapped in a unkind world, a hunter of predators occasionally engulfed by the harshness of the reservation.

But seriously, wouldn't this have been a more daring, conflicted story had the main investigator been a Native American unbeholding to two white people brought in to do his job?

“Wind River”

★ ★ ★

Starring: Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Gil Birmingham, Jon Bernthal, Graham Greene

Directed by: Taylor Sheridan

Other: A Weinstein Company release. At the River East and Century Centre in Chicago, plus the Evanston Century 12. Rated R for language, sexual assault and violence. 111 minutes