Film review: The Dead Don’t Hurt
An American frontier love story with two fine actors delivers an elevated Western with grand themes of revenge and forgiveness – and violence not far beneath the surface.
A Western starring Viggo Mortensen promises a lot. The Danish-American actor skirted around mass stardom playing Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, but mostly stays below the radar in films like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2009), the hard-core Eastern Promises (2007) and the almost perfect small thriller A History of Violence (2005).
Mortensen wrote, directed and stars in this film set in frontier America that opens with a knight in armour riding through a majestic forest. It is a mysterious image we return to, sometimes with a little girl watching. The child, we guess, grows up to be the quietly resolute Canadian immigrant Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) and the knight is the man she loves, Danish immigrant Holger Olsen, played by Mortensen.
Their love affair is a thing of wonder. She sets eyes on him in San Francisco, and cannot look away. Neither can he. She joins Olsen and we get our first taste of what an open book life was for pioneers out west. Married? Not married? Everyone was establishing their place outside of normal society and their success relied on cunning, strength and resilience. The sheriff’s word was law, until someone shot him.
Together the couple ride from San Francisco to Olsen’s dream home, which is a barren wooden shack nestled at the lifeless base of a sandy mountain somewhere near Elk Flats, Nevada. “This is it?” Le Coudy asks. There are no trees but once a well is dug, the place is scrubbed and Le Coudy plants flowers, their life begins.
Westerns tend towards grand themes of love, family, honour and betrayal, and The Dead Don’t Hurt has them all. Olsen wants to embrace his new life as an American and feels honour-bound to sign up and fight for the Union. Le Coudy is tough and can manage on her own but she has attracted the attention of Weston (Solly McLeod), the son of the powerful landowner who has the town in his pay. Weston is unaccustomed to being turned down and after Olsen leaves, he arrives at her home one night, determined to have his way.
From this, all events flow into a drama that is punishing, cruel and wonderful.
These are not new ideas but the way in which they unfold in this tale, sparingly told, give them fresh beauty and life. In lesser hands, the story might have been an overreach, but Mortensen is a magnificent actor, a creature always beautiful to look at who carries the air of a wounded beast. And Luxembourg actress Krieps has gone from strength to strength from her breakout role in Phantom Thread (2017), where she met Daniel Day-Lewis head-on in a dance of madness, to more recent roles like Old (2021) and Bergman Island (2021). Her acting is subtle and gracious, and she commands the screen in ways that feel like early Meryl Streep.
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This is obviously a passion project of Mortensen’s and you could quibble over some of his editorial decisions. The opening announces Le Coudy’s death and we move back and forth through time to track how we got here. The timewarp adds little to a searing frontier drama that occasionally meanders and struggles to find a note on which to stop.
Nonetheless, we come away with a sense of being wrapped up inside a great love story at a time in America when men and women found their own power and the sheriff was just a gunfight away from death.
The Dead Don’t Hurt is in cinemas now.