In many of its scenes, the Prime Video series Dark Winds reproduces almost point by point the claustrophobic atmosphere of the novel Leaphorn & Chee by Tony Hillman. The adaptation is much more than a narration that shows the unique atmosphere of its version on paper. In reality, it is a mysterious and eloquent journey through the idea of murder and the secrets that are kept.
Also of the chiaroscuro points of good and evil. Everything, by exploring the question of identity and roots, the idea of the ethnic and in the end, from the enigmatic. After all, the original book carefully showed the way Native Americans look at the culture around them. And she did it with such elegance as to surprise by the neatness of it.
Dark Winds tries to do the same and succeeds by taking what could be a typical suspense thriller and transforming it into a lesson in style. With its considered pace and painstaking analysis of guilt and fear, the Prime Video series finds its balance in its discretion.
AMC’s production is not a flashy and violent product like Better Call Saul. Or a slow and patient show like The Walking Dead. In reality, the show is deeply engaged in building a brilliant idea about the law and its limits. But at the same time, the importance of the environment and the context, as a space worthy of being contemplated as something more than an idea. In Dark Winds, the 1970s era in which the story takes place is much more than a sense of time. It is a series of intertwined ideas that meditate on prejudice, discrimination and neutral spaces in the legal field.
Dark Winds
Dark Winds doesn’t try to reinvent the suspense thriller genre based on unsolved murders. Instead, it does something better and that is to build a solid, meticulous and intelligent narrative that is surprisingly solid. At a time when traditional plots tend to experiment and seek to break commonplaces, the AMC series reinforces the scheme. But it does so with surprising elegance and sophistication. With his understated air, it might seem like a risk-free look, but in reality his argument is more ambitious than it seems.
The painful places in Dark Winds
Of course, he attaches special importance to the fact that the Navajo reservation in Monument Valley (Utah) is a complicated scenario. Not only because of the laws that govern, the customs that it goes through and the perception of the individual that maintains its limits. Also due to the fact that it emphasizes a rare pop culture view of raceethnicity, culture and its limits.
Although racism towards Afro-Americans is a frequent theme in the North American public debate, the one suffered by the natives of the country is not so. Dark Winds it makes it clear and in the same way that the book from which it comes brings it to the fore. What happens when a crime unites two parts of a broken country? What happens when a criminal act has the uncomfortable capacity to force a detailed discussion?
The series also has a practical, slow and traditional pulse that benefits its narration. When the investigation of a formidable robbery in New Mexico is linked to two murders in the Navajo tribe, there will be an inevitable intersection of forces. On one side is Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon), Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), and the solid Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten).
As the link between the world outside the reservation and the mysterious beyond the world of the white man, all three characters gravitate around duty. But also, from the painful, complicated and often uncomfortable condition of understanding that the law is not the same for everyone. And much more complicated still that it does not apply in the same way for North American citizens.
Dark Winds it plays carefully with the connotation about the lines that separate specific groups and it succeeds, with a sophisticated pulse. This year the series by command of heaven, starring Andrew Garfield, delved into similar approaches. How to deal with invisible lines that divide communities, customs and cultures?
Race, belonging and fear in Dark Winds
But while the Garfield series explored a heinous crime in the realm of religion, Dark Winds wonders about belonging. The Navajo community is a world apart. Also, its inhabitants and what happens between them. But the constant perception of that difference is a form of violence that makes the series more complicated and hard.
Throughout the chapters, the personal stories of the cops — both white and Reserve members — intermingle. The script uses the resource to analyze racism and discrimination, but without going into usual lines. What happens when a Navajo man dies and the weight of his death implies a crime in the world beyond the Reservation?
The connotation is not easy and it gets harder as the series focuses on the fact of race. What happens to the condition of the ethnic that separates? Or the cultural ignorance that attacks? Dark Winds dares with both issues and moves firmly into regions that are very unusual in a thriller of this nature. In particular, when the investigation gets tougherstranger, more violent and in the end, a dark point in the middle of the connotation about fear and exclusion.
Those awkward places in Dark Winds
One of the best developed spots in Dark Winds it is the way he analyzes exclusion. Without making the point eminently political, there is a lot of social commentary in this uncomfortable story in which death is a bridge between cultures. Also, a recognition of the way in which the fact of the other is analyzed in the midst of a country crossed by all kinds of questions about identity.
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Dark Winds it is elegant to the extent that it knows how to differentiate a problem at the bottom of the story of something more general. Powerful, eloquent, but specifically deeper than other series like it, the six-part series is self-conscious. Like the book from which it comes, it is a completely intuitive approach to the fact of race, law and identity. But at the same time, it is also a precise thriller that meditates in a sophisticated way on crime as an inevitable element of culture. Between both things, Dark Winds knows what to do to narrate an impeccable and unique story. The highest point of him in the middle of a genre, sometimes more interested in the spectacular than in the quality.