Range Rider
2023 · 14m · United States
Directed by Colin Arisman
Genres: adventure, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Washington's lone range rider uses nonlethal methods to keep wolves from preying on cattle and prove coexistence is possible.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the doc to choose between wolves and ranchers—hero-versus-threat binary—but Arisman just... refuses to play that game, letting coexistence breathe without sermon. It's almost boring how right it is.
A deliberate film in the tradition of observational nature documentary, though it treads well-worn ground; the formal restraint—letting landscape and routine speak—recalls the best of that lineage, even if it doesn't quite reinvent it.
The decision to stay with the rider's physical methods—the watching, the riding, the non-action—rather than cutting to dramatic wolf confrontation or ranch-hand conflict is what makes this land-and-labor story breathe; it's a radical choice to trust stillness over spectacle.
Reviews
Range Rider follows three seasons in Curry's life as he, his horses, and his trusty dogs attempt to find a middle ground between wolf conservationists and the multi-generational ranching operations that also call the region home. It's a film that wouldn't have been possible just 15 years ago, and an important one — both for the quiet beauty it displays and for the message of hope and compromise it ends with.