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Wind River
"Wind River" (2017), written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, follows a wildlife tracker and a young FBI agent investigating a murder on a Wyoming Native American reservation, addressing the real and severely underreported crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States. Its wintry, remote Wyoming reservation setting gave the film a genuinely different visual and tonal register than most contemporary crime dramas, using the isolation and harsh conditions of the landscape as a direct extension of the story's themes of institutional neglect and isolation. The film closed with on-screen statistics specifically highlighting the lack of data tracking missing Indigenous women in the United States, giving "Wind River" a direct advocacy dimension uncommon in mainstream genre filmmaking, using its neo-western crime structure to draw attention to a genuine, ongoing societal failure. Its combination of its stark Wyoming reservation setting and its pointed real-world advocacy around missing Indigenous women has made "Wind River" one of the most socially significant neo-western films of the 2010s.
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The Rider
"The Rider" (2017), directed by Chloé Zhao, follows a young Lakota rodeo rider and horse trainer forced to reckon with his identity after a near-fatal head injury ends his competitive riding career, filmed on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation using non-professional actors playing versions of themselves. Its docufiction approach, casting real rodeo rider Brady Jandreau as a fictionalized version of his own actual life story following his real career-ending injury, gave the film an unusually direct, lived-in authenticity relative to more conventionally scripted and cast neo-western dramas. The film's quiet, contemplative visual style, capturing the Great Plains landscape and horse-training sequences with a naturalistic intimacy, established the same directorial sensibility Zhao would later bring to her Academy Award-winning "Nomadland" a few years afterward. Its combination of its genuinely lived-in docufiction authenticity and Zhao's naturalistic directorial style has made "The Rider" one of the most critically acclaimed and quietly powerful neo-western films of the 2010s.
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