Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River (2017) sends a young FBI agent, Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), to a Wyoming reservation after a teenage girl is found dead in the snow, miles from anywhere. She teams up with Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a wildlife tracker who knows the land and the family. The mystery is simple. What makes the film hit so hard is the cold, the distance and the feeling that nobody outside the reservation is paying attention.
So the best movies like Wind River share its atmosphere more than its plot: remote places, slow investigations, grief, and violence that arrives suddenly and stays with you. Here are 13 of them, starting with the closest matches.
Quick Picks
- Closest in tone: Hell or High Water
- Same writer, bigger scale: Sicario
- Best investigation: Prisoners
- Best snowbound crime story: Fargo
- Best small-town mystery: The Dry
- Strangest wilderness thriller: Hold the Dark
- Closest to horror: Wolf Creek
The Best Movies Like Wind River
1. Hell or High Water (2016)
Two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) rob branches of the bank that is about to take their family’s ranch in West Texas. An ageing Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) and his partner (Gil Birmingham, who plays the grieving father in Wind River) set out after them.
Sheridan wrote it the year before he directed Wind River, and the two films feel like neighbours. Both are about forgotten places, people squeezed by forces bigger than themselves, and lawmen who understand more than they can fix.
Watch it for: the same writer’s voice, in dust instead of snow.
2. Sicario (2015)
An FBI agent (Emily Blunt) joins a task force working against a Mexican cartel and quickly realises nobody will tell her what the operation is for. Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin play the men who do know.
Sheridan wrote this one too, and Kate Macer is a close cousin of Jane Banner: capable, out of her depth and surrounded by people who understand the territory better than she does. Denis Villeneuve directs, so it’s bigger and slicker, but the dread is the same. For more like it, see our guide to movies like Sicario.
Watch it for: another outsider agent learning how little her badge counts for.
3. Prisoners (2013)
On Thanksgiving, two young girls disappear from a quiet Pennsylvania neighbourhood. One father (Hugh Jackman) loses faith in the investigation led by Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) and decides to get answers himself.
Emotionally it may be the closest film here. Like Wind River, it’s about a parent’s grief turning into something harder, and Roger Deakins shoots the grey, wet suburbs so they feel almost as hostile as the Wyoming snow.
Watch it for: a slow, punishing mystery about what grief does to people.
4. No Country for Old Men (2007)
A hunter (Josh Brolin) finds a case of drug money in the West Texas scrub and keeps it. Hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) comes to get it back, and an ageing sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) follows the trail of bodies.
The Coen brothers use open country the way Sheridan does: big spaces don’t mean freedom, they mean nowhere to hide. Jones’ sheriff shares Cory’s weariness, the sense of a world that has moved beyond anything the law can handle.
Watch it for: landscape-driven dread and an unforgettable villain.
5. Fargo (1996)
A Minnesota car salesman (William H. Macy) arranges to have his own wife kidnapped for the ransom. It goes wrong almost immediately, and a heavily pregnant local police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), starts following the trail through the snow.
Fargo is much funnier than Wind River, but the two share flat white landscapes, small communities and a patient local investigator who sees things the outsiders miss. McDormand won the Oscar for Best Actress.
Watch it for: the great snowbound crime film, with a sense of humour.
6. The Dry (2020)
Federal agent Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) returns to his drought-stricken hometown in rural Australia for the funeral of a childhood friend, who is said to have killed his family and then himself. Falk starts asking questions, and the town’s memories of a girl’s death from his own youth come back with them.
Where Wind River is frozen, The Dry is scorched, but the landscape does the same job: it traps people in their history. It’s adapted from Jane Harper’s bestselling novel.
Watch it for: a careful small-town mystery with two timelines.
7. Insomnia (2002)
An LA detective (Al Pacino) flies to a small Alaskan town to help investigate a teenage girl’s murder. In summer the sun never sets there, and after a mistake in the fog he stops sleeping while the killer (Robin Williams) starts calling him.
Christopher Nolan’s remake of a Norwegian thriller swaps Wind River‘s darkness for endless daylight, but it’s the same idea: an experienced investigator, a remote community and a landscape that wears him down.
Watch it for: Pacino and Williams in a cat-and-mouse game in the Alaskan wilds.
8. Hold the Dark (2018)
A writer and wolf expert (Jeffrey Wright) is called to a remote Alaskan village by a mother (Riley Keough) whose son has been taken by wolves. Then her husband (Alexander Skarsgård) comes home from war, and the story turns into something far darker.
Jeremy Saulnier’s film is stranger and more violent than Wind River, but it shares the snow, the isolation and the sense of a place with its own rules.
Watch it for: a wilderness mystery that drifts towards horror.
9. A Simple Plan (1998)
Two brothers (Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton) and a friend find a crashed plane in the snowy woods with millions of dollars inside. They agree to keep it quiet, and the plan starts falling apart almost at once.
Sam Raimi keeps it quiet and controlled, and the snow-covered setting gives it the same hush as Wind River. It’s less about solving a crime than watching decent people slide into one.
Watch it for: a slow-burn moral collapse in a frozen landscape.
10. Frozen River (2008)
Struggling single mother Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) teams up with a Mohawk woman to smuggle migrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River from Canada into upstate New York, on reservation land on the border.
It’s not a murder mystery, but it’s the film here closest to Wind River‘s social side: life on a reservation, poverty, and how little help the authorities offer. Leo was nominated for an Oscar.
Watch it for: a tense, grounded drama on the ice.
11. Blue Ruin (2013)
A drifter (Macon Blair) learns that the man convicted of killing his parents is being released from prison. He sets out for revenge and is completely unprepared for what follows.
Saulnier’s breakthrough refuses to make violence look cool, which is exactly how Wind River handles it. Every fight is clumsy, frightening and costly.
Watch it for: a revenge thriller that takes the consequences seriously.
12. Cold in July (2014)
In 1989 East Texas, a family man (Michael C. Hall) shoots an intruder in his house. The dead man’s father (Sam Shepard) arrives looking for revenge, and then the story turns into something else entirely, with Don Johnson as a private investigator.
Jim Mickle’s film shares Wind River‘s sense that ordinary small towns can hide terrible things. It keeps changing shape, so it’s best to know as little as possible.
Watch it for: a crime story that keeps surprising you.
13. Wolf Creek (2005)
Three backpackers break down near a remote crater in the Australian outback. A friendly local (John Jarratt) offers to help, and he is not what he seems.
This is a horror film, not a crime drama, but it takes Wind River‘s fear of empty country to the extreme: once things go wrong, distance is the biggest enemy. If you want more like it, see our list of movies like Eden Lake.
Watch it for: the outback as a trap.
Movies Like Wind River by Type
Taylor Sheridan’s frontier films
Sheridan wrote Sicario, then Hell or High Water, then wrote and directed Wind River. The three are often called his frontier trilogy, and all three ask what the law means in places where it barely reaches.
Snowbound crime stories
Snow makes everything quieter and more exposed. Fargo, A Simple Plan, Hold the Dark and Frozen River all use winter the way Wind River does, as part of the danger.
Remote-town investigations
An investigator arrives in a small, closed community and has to win its trust. Try The Dry, Insomnia and Fargo.
Wilderness thrillers that tip into horror
Wolf Creek and Hold the Dark push the isolation of Wind River much further. For more films where the landscape is the threat, see our guide to the best survival thriller movies.
Small, raw revenge films
Wind River ends with a reckoning. Blue Ruin and Cold in July are small independent films about revenge that show how messy it really is.
Why Wind River Works
Cory knows the land because he has lived and suffered there. Jane knows procedure but arrives in the wrong clothes, with no backup and no idea how far apart everything is. The film keeps showing how distance and neglect decide what happens, from the miles Natalie ran barefoot in the snow to the hours it would take for help to arrive.
The violence is rare, sudden and shocking. The standoff at the drilling site lasts a few minutes, but the film spends an hour building towards it, and when it comes it feels inevitable. That patience, and the grief underneath it, is what the best films on this list share.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the closest movie to Wind River?
Hell or High Water and Sicario, both written by Taylor Sheridan, are the closest in tone. For a similar investigation in a remote community, try The Dry or Insomnia.
Is Wind River based on a true story?
The story itself is fiction, but it was inspired by real problems. The film ends with a note that missing-person statistics aren’t kept for Native American women, so nobody knows how many are missing.
What else has Taylor Sheridan made?
Besides writing Sicario and Hell or High Water, he directed Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021) and co-created TV series including Yellowstone, Mayor of Kingstown and Tulsa King.
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Table of Contents
- Quick Picks
- The Best Movies Like Wind River
- 1. Hell or High Water (2016)
- 2. Sicario (2015)
- 3. Prisoners (2013)
- 4. No Country for Old Men (2007)
- 5. Fargo (1996)
- 6. The Dry (2020)
- 7. Insomnia (2002)
- 8. Hold the Dark (2018)
- 9. A Simple Plan (1998)
- 10. Frozen River (2008)
- 11. Blue Ruin (2013)
- 12. Cold in July (2014)
- 13. Wolf Creek (2005)
- Movies Like Wind River by Type
- Taylor Sheridan’s frontier films
- Snowbound crime stories
- Remote-town investigations
- Wilderness thrillers that tip into horror
- Small, raw revenge films
- Why Wind River Works
- Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the closest movie to Wind River?
- Is Wind River based on a true story?
- What else has Taylor Sheridan made?