Every student who’s ever taken a creative writing course has heard the phrases “man versus man” and “man versus nature,” but one imagines filmmaker Taylor Sheridan circling them both in his notebook and jotting, “YES. THIS.” in the margin. His work as writer and/or director of films like “Hell or High Water” and “Wind River,” as well as the TV show “Yellowstone,” often sets his characters against nature, both in the compositional and confrontational sense.
Sheridan’s very much in his wheelhouse in “Those Who Wish Me Dead,” a tale of a firefighter seeking redemption, a sheriff and his wife fighting for survival, and a young witness trying to elude his captors, and all of them coping with a massive forest fire in Big Sky country.