Taylor Sheridan's “Wind River” A Top Pick On Netflix Again As Fans Await Sequel

Entertaining, but not very accurate is how former Fremont County Coroner Mark Stratmoen describes Taylor Sheridan’s hit 2017 movie “Wind River.” 

The movie starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen was one of Sheridan’s first and has been trending on Netflix amid media coverage suggesting that a second installment of the story line is coming out soon. 

Filming on the second movie wrapped in 2023 under Canadian filmmaker Kari Skogland. Her most recent project is “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” a television series for Marvel Studios. 

No announcement has been made yet on when or where Wind River 2.0 will come out, but several media outlets have been speculating on it of late, creating new buzz for the old film. 

Sheridan, a filmmaker and screenwriter, is known for neo-Western dramas like “Wind River” and the hit show “Yellowstone.” While largely filmed elsewhere, Sheridan’s work often draws on Wyoming’s rugged landscapes and frontier themes.

The events of a “Wind River” sequel will likely pick up a few years after the first film’s conclusion. 

The original followed FBI Agent Jane Banner (Olsen) and wildlife officer Cory Lambert (Renner) as they investigated the shocking death of an 18-year-old woman on the Wind River Reservation. The barefoot woman is found lying face down, frozen to the ground, in a pool of her own frozen blood.

Stratmoen became involved in the first “Wind River” movie after Sheridan’s team reached out to him, asking for permission to use his office’s official badge and logo in the movie. 

At the time, as coroner of Fremont County, Stratmoen wasn’t willing to do that without first seeing the script.

“Taylor Sheridan wasn’t well known at the time,” Stratmoen told Cowboy State Daily. “So, I wanted to know if it was an exploitation film or some sort of horror movie or what. I got a script, and this was before they really started production on it, and I went through it and then gave them a review on the script and made some suggestions, a lot of which they ignored.”

The list of things that were wrong with the movie seemed endless. From distances that were completely off for Wyoming, to forensics that wouldn’t fly anywhere in the country, much less Wyoming.

“Like they used bite marks as evidence, and those have been discounted as evidence for well over a decade as being unreliable,” Stratmoen said. “You can’t use them in court anymore as far as identifying someone.”

DNA evidence was also mishandled in the movie, and there were lots of procedural errors. 

But the big, glaring, over-the-top error was when EMTs showed up with heat guns — essentially blow-dryers — to try and thaw the corpse out in the Wind River mountains.

That one had Stratmoen laughing out loud. Literally. 

“I wrote them back and I said, ‘Now that’s ludicrous,’” Stratmoen said. “I said, ‘No. 1, you’re not going to have somebody haul a generator out there in a tent.'”

The location of the dead woman was only accessible by snowmobile in winter. Hauling a lot of heavy equipment like a generator would be impractical. 

Worse than that, heat guns would destroy all the evidence that investigators are trying to preserve.

“EMTs are also never involved in investigating a death scene or recovering a body like that,” Stratmoen added. “The coroner would have been out there doing that stuff. And, in the case of anybody who is frozen, you’d recover them frozen. They have to defrost slowly for two to three days in the morgue before you can do an autopsy.”

The ground around the body would also be taken, in case there’s anything frozen there that is also evidence.

Do Lungs Really Freeze When You Run In The Cold?

The producers did take Stratmoen’s advice on that particular point and didn’t show heat guns thawing out bodies in the movie. But the movie could have also used some medical experts as well, to help it avoid another particularly embarrassing error. 

“See how the toe’s turned out and the front is much deeper than the back,” Lambert tells Banner. “That’s ‘cause she was running. Come here, let me show you. She ran until she dropped here. See the pool of blood where her face hit the snow? 

“Now look, it’s 20 below here at night,” Lambert continued. “So, if you fill your lungs up with that cold air and you’re running, you could freeze them up. Your lungs fill up with blood. You start coughing it up. So, wherever she came from, she ran all the way here. Her lungs burst here. She curled up in that tree line and drowned in her own blood.”

It’s a dramatic moment in the movie, one that has Lambert telling Banner what a fighter the woman was. It’s in that moment that the viewer really starts to root for the slain 18-year-old whose life was cut short much too soon.

But it’s not really correct that lungs would freeze from running in the cold, even when that cold is extreme, according to Dr. Aryan Shiari, a pulmonologist with the Mayo Clinic. 

“It’s generally possible, but our body does its best to keep our core temperature about 37 degrees (Celsius),” he said in a video explaining whether lungs can freeze while running outside in extremely cold conditions. “Our lungs are encased within our thoracic cavity. So, unless your whole body is at risk of freezing and that would be near-death or death experience, your lungs themselves can’t freeze.”

The cold dry air could cause irritation, leading to bronchospasms and tightening of the chest — but the lungs themselves, being inside the body, would be one of the last things to freeze.

What’s A Homicide

One of the more glaring law enforcement errors that Stratmoen pointed out that remained in the final movie involved whether the woman’s death would be deemed a homicide.

Banner argues passionately with the coroner about that, after he tells her that he can’t rule the 18-year-old woman’s death a homicide, since she actually died due to exposure. 

Banner is concerned this will mean the FBI recalls her with no investigation of the woman’s death, even though she was obviously the victim of some type of violence that led to her frozen run. That violence appeared to include sexual assault.

The whole conversation is an important plot point for the movie, as well as its messaging that murdered and missing Indigenous women don’t always get the attention they deserve from law enforcement. 

But it was unrealistic to build it around that particular aspect of the case, Stratmoen said.

“They were calling it an accident in the script,” Stratmoen said. “and I said, ‘No, that would be a homicide, because if … the initiating incident is a violent crime, then even though it was an accidental freezing, you would still call it a homicide.’”

While Wyoming has faced criticism when it comes to the handling of murdered and missing Indigenous women, Stratmoen has worked with law enforcement a long time and doesn’t believe that such a death would have been ruled accidental in Wyoming as the film portrayed.

“The effort is excellent, because it is an issue,” Stratmoen said. 

But it’s also a complex issue, one that sometimes gets confused by worried family members when someone has voluntarily removed themselves for whatever reason.

“Some of the missing are missing voluntarily,” Stratmoen said. 

 Lander Had Then And Still Has Its Own FBI Office

The movie also had a convoluted explanation for Banner’s presence in Wyoming, claiming she’d flown out from a conference and was just the nearest FBI agent that could be sent to the scene of the crime in Wyoming. 

“But the FBI has an office in Lander,” Stratmoen said. 

That office has been there a long time, Stratmoen added, including within the time frame of the movie. 

“The fish out of water was kind of an integral part of her character,” Stratmoen said. “So, I can understand why they’re going to kind of go with something like that. But the FBI office in Lander, when I was working with them, had numerous agents, a lot of whom were female, and they were all extremely good at their jobs. So, a lot of the behavior and stuff that they had (Banner) doing wasn’t really representative of a skilled FBI agent.”

That wasn’t particularly pleasing to the female agents working at the FBI office when the movie came out, Stratmoen added.

“The agents who were working at the time that I worked with, they thought it was terrible,” he said. 

Just Find A ‘Current’ Bush

Stratmoen, who is retired, has not been asked to consult on the second Wind River movie, but said he hopes the technical details will be more accurate this time around.

“At least they did leave the scene with the heat guns out,” he said, chuckling. “You know, the old saying around here is that if you’ve got something like that and you’re out in the middle of the Wind River Mountains, you know what you do? Well, you plug that into a ‘current’ bush.”

That’s a running joke, Stratmoen said, for newbies to Wyoming who don’t realize just how remote some of its areas really are. 

The sort of “welcome to Wyoming” mentality behind that joke was also a constant theme throughout the Wind River movie, and it’s something that did help make the movie entertaining to Stratmoen. 

But the fact that it wasn’t filmed in Wyoming is not particularly entertaining. 

“The only scene that was filmed in Wyoming was right at the beginning,” he said. “There’s a shot of Lander’s Main Street and that’s it.”

That’s a disappointment because the real Wind River Mountains are beautiful, Stratmoen said.

It appears the second film won’t show much of the real Wind River mountains either. 

Helen Wilson, executive director of Wind River Visitors Council, told Cowboy State Daily that Skogland and lead actor Martin Sensmeier did scout locations on the Wind River Reservation for the second film. But no deal was reached.

“I connected them with several people on the reservation,” Wilson said. “That led to additional meetings which I wasn’t involved in. The producers ultimately decided to film elsewhere, though I understand that some locals from the Reservation were flown in to participate in the production.”

Representatives of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho did not respond to Cowboy State Daily inquiries about the movies or participation by locals in it. 

The first Wind River movie didn’t appear to make much impact on tourism, Wilson added, but she does plan to explore the tourism potential around the second movie with the tribe once it comes out.

“I’ll be talking with the tribes about that and will move forward in a way that reflects their preferences and guidance,” she said. 

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.