An Obscure 2022 Murder Mystery Western Is Killing It On Netflix

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Westerns might have fallen out of favor decades ago, but they never truly died altogether. Even after the genre became reliably unpopular in the 1970s, we still had a trickle of truly great Westerns from 1992's "Unforgiven" to 2010's "True Grit." Heck, there's even been some great Western movies to come out of the last decade. Still, it remains true that the genre's glory days are long behind it.

But in recent years, as Hollywood has discovered that conservatives also watch things and dads everywhere have finally learned how to use streaming services, there's been hints of a modest Western revival. By far the most influential factor at play here is Taylor Sheridan's "Yellowstone" and its various spin-offs, which have proved that Westerns, both neo and traditional, not only maintain a certain appeal, but can be the basis for some of the most successful shows on TV today.

As such, we're sure to see much more in the way of Western-tinged entertainment in the years to come — a process you might have noticed has already begun, as streaming shows and movies find ways to shoehorn the "Yellowstone" name into their titles and Netflix finds success with Western series such as "American Primeval" and "Ransom Canyon," which has been dominating the Netflix chart recently. Now, 2022 movie "Murder at Yellowstone City," which started life as "Murder at Emigrant Gulch" before the producers likely thought it best to Sheridan-ize their film, is dominating the Netflix charts as the Western continues its modest but very real resurgence.

"Murder at Yellowstone City" is directed by Australian filmmaker Richard Gray and stars "It Chapter Two" actor Isaiah Mustafa alongside Gabriel Byrne ("In Treatment") and Thomas Jane ("Hung"). After a prospector strikes gold in the mining town of Yellowstone City, he's quickly murdered, prompting Sheriff Jim Ambrose (Byrne) to assume that newcomer and former slave Cicero (Mustafa) is the killer. Soon, however, it emerges that Cicero is innocent and the town's minister, Thaddeus Murphy (Jane) along with wife, Alice (Anna Camp), do their best to convince Ambrose to find the true culprit. The movie arrived in a handful of theaters and was given a VOD release back in 2022, which seems to be the year of "Yellowstone"-adjacent TV films yielding, as it did, "Disappearance in Yellowstone" and "Yellowstone Romance."

Despite using "Yellowstone" rather than "Emigrant Gulch" in its title, however, nobody really paid attention to "Murder at Yellowstone City." But that's ok, because the movie just hit Netflix and has proved to be an immediate hit. Arriving on the streamer in the United States on April 24, 2025, the film debuted in the number one spot the following day, as subscribers apparently swarmed to Gray's overlooked Western the moment it hit the servers, as per streaming viewership tracker FlixPatrol. That has sent "Murder at Yellowstone City" to the number 60 spot on the worldwide charts, but considering the movie looks to only be available stateside, that's not a bad little debut. How may dads turned it off after realizing it has nothing to do with the show "Yellowstone," however, is not a metric that FlixPatrol tracks.

With a 25% on Rotten Tomatoes, the short answer to whether "Murder at Yellowstone City" is worth a look is a simple "not really." The longer answer is that RT has only collected three "Top Critic" reviews for this film, so that Tomatometer isn't the best gauge.

Joe Leydon over at Variety liked the movie, praising Richard Gray's "well-crafted and handsomely mounted indie" as "a solidly constructed mystery" and a "conventionally satisfying oater, with much to recommend to fans of either genre who rarely get to sample such a mix." Of the three Top Critic reviews, however, Leydon's in the only positive one, with Noel Murray of the Los Angeles Times lamenting the way in which "Murder at Yellowstone City" "strands an excellent cast in a slow-paced story with a muted tone, too far removed from its pulpy inspirations."

The Austin Chronicle's Josh Kupecki wasn't too impressed either, writing, "The story is best served as something to be glanced at rather than examined too closely." That sounds like exactly the kind of "ambient TV," as "Filterworld" author Kyle Chayka dubbed it, on which Netflix thrives, and when you combine it with a nascent "Yellowstone"-induced western renaissance, you've got a streaming hit on your hands.

Meanwhile, "Murder at Yellowstone City" has managed to at least dethrone "iHostage," a movie about a real Apple Store robbery that has been dominating Netflix of late. That thriller is now in the number 2 spot in the U.S., while Clint Eastwood's controversial 2014 war movie, after originally usurping "iHostage" for the Netflix throne, has now fallen to number four. How long this Western can hold onto the top spot remains to be seen, but there's surely a lot more "Yellowstone"-type stuff in the works to replace it when it does disappear from the charts.