No Children: The Wind (Emma Tammi, 2018) / The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent, 2018)

I hope you die. I hope we both die.

Westerns are about territory. It’s right there in the name. These are stories about land, and all the iconography we’ve accumulated around them — white hats, black hats, shootouts, horses, gold star badges telling you who the good guy is — is just shorthand for the land the characters are occupying, and what their relationship to it will be. 

In a Wester…