johnspringer-95440

Wind River is brilliantly deliberate and unadorned. It's nominally a crime procedural set on the titular reservation, but it's also an unflinching examination of a pitiless environment's influence on the people who forge a hardscrabble existence there. The movie deftly handles some weighty topics within the confines of a sparse and fairly intimate script. There's an understated realistic brutality to the most horrific scene, in particular, that makes it especially effective and harrowing.

Love Hurts is the sort of black comedy which doesn't really get made any more, and which apparently never enjoyed much popularity beyond a brief flourish in the late 1990s and early 2000s. (Something like 2001's 'One Night at McCool's' seems like an appropriate antecedent.) Considering the sub-sub-genre has rarely been in vogue it isn't surprising that this throwback didn't resonate with audiences or critics; but it is a shame considering that (with expectations appropriately tempered) it's entertaining and well-acted. If nothing else there's something admirable in the DGAFness of combining noirish thriller plot elements with romcom simplistic character arcs with action that's part slapstick comedy and part hyperbolic body-horror.

The bulk of the story is set in France in 1881, apparently, although the characters seem to be Anglo-Irish; technology and references to contemporaneous events span anywhere from the 1760s to the late 1800s. These are minor issues but they give a small idea of the movie's muddled sense of itself. Some individual scenes are compelling and there's good use of the eerie possibilities offered by the misty, isolated landscape. Unfortunately the individual scenes don't really coalesce and the narrative doesn't maintain its early momentum. The premise is overstuffed with various ideas, none of which get fully developed. The third act is sustained by character decisions that devolve from irrational to inane. Creature effects are unique but they're also disappointing.