In the spirit of this film’s old west setting, allow me to put my cards on the table: I had to watch The Dead Don’t Hurt twice to understand it. This is not because the film is abstract, deals with heady concepts that are difficult to comprehend, or is tricky to follow from moment to moment. It’s because the film is doing something that it isn’t going out of its way to tell you it’s doing, and if you are watching a little absently – let’s be honest, a professional hazard for a critic – you might miss that it’s doing it altogether. Which I did. And if it were not for needing to fact-check a character detail on Wikipedia, I would have posted a different version of this review that I’d already written, none the wiser for my ignorance.
The thing it’s doing is not necessarily a spoiler, because if you’re paying attention to locations, details of which characters are absent or present, or other signifiers, you could well glom on within 15 minutes. Viggo Mortensen’s second feature as a director, a western set mostly during the American Civil War, is actually told out of sequence, with one of its main characters breathing their last breath in the very first shot. However, you do have to be paying close attention to the fact that this is the same actor who appears later, because The Dead Don’t Hurt is not handing you anything on a platter, which is usually a good thing. (Unless you completely miss what it’s doing, but let’s not keep talking about that.)
Whether or not the non-linear choice is perfectly suited to the themes of this film, or falls more into the category of an inessential narrative trick, is probably in the eyes of the beholder. However, there’s no doubt that it has a cumulative impact, especially during a second viewing. And especially because Viggo Mortensen – the actor many of us first met nearly a quarter century ago in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – is now 66 years old, and he’s thinking about death. As the title of his film would suggest.
This is a purposefully quiet and low-key western, which has all the genre’s tropes and familiar beats, just at half the speed. It is contemplative rather than propulsive, which seems exactly as Mortensen envisioned it. And like most if not all westerns, it considers the thin line between life and death. As Clint Eastwood’s William Munny said in Unforgiven, “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he has, and everything he’s every gonna have.”
Mortensen also plays the lead character, a Danish immigrant called Holger Olsen, who now fully identifies as American in the years surrounding the Civil War. He lives in a rocky part of an unidentified area of the American west, whose lack of trees is commented on by a future guest. One day he’s approached on horseback by the mayor of the nearby township (Danny Huston) and a small posse, who are coming to report the brutal murder of six men in a local saloon. They’re requesting a quick apprehension and trial of the perpetrator. See, Holger Olsen is also the sheriff.
Only the man they’ve framed for the job – there were no witnesses – is a simpleton who can barely speak, and is capable of offering nothing in his own defence, with a corrupt judge who uses a pistol as a gavel ready to drop the hammer on him. Sitting nearby and ensuring that all goes to plan is Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), the rich and well-connected father of the miscreant who actually did the deed, Weston (Solly McLeod). Killing a half-dozen men may be among the nicest things Weston has done. But they get away with the frame job due to a deal with the mayor to scratch each other’s backs.
Enter another whose native language is not English, the French-speaking Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps), who coyly won’t say where she’s actually from because she too is now American. She and Holger form a fast friendship that becomes a romantic relationship, and she becomes the guest who comments on his lack of greenery. Planning a longer-term stay, Vivienne works to make it more hospitable – for only short-term gain. Holger has heeded the call to enlist to fight with the north, which will take him away from this homestead for an unknown period, leaving her there by her lonesome to tend to it and to work in the local watering hole. But the Jeffries have interests here too, and Weston has interests in her.
The makings for a fairly standard western are in Mortensen’s sights, and he consistently steers away from them. His own performance is one of the keys to that. Mortensen has played both dangerous men and heroes, but he’s rarely played a character quite as soft-spoken as this. The actor barely moves his mouth as he releases little words into the air, making calculations with his eyes that curdle into quietude by the time they reach his lips. He knows he’s made choices and has to answer for them, when there may be no answers.
One of those ideas the film explores is just how vulnerable individuals were in a land and at a time when the law was essentially powerless, and often there for pageantry only. Given the unsavoury attentions of this murderous fiend toward his wife, it seems unthinkable that Holger would leave even a woman as capable as she is alone in the middle of nowhere for an untold duration. Perhaps he never actually saw Weston leer at Vivienne. Perhaps he was too trusting, despite his share of the world’s disappointments, alluded to from time to time. Perhaps he didn’t know that the film was being played out of sequence and the murders hadn’t actually happened yet.
However you slice it, the call of his duty to his principles – a fight against slave owners – is stronger than his duty to the woman he loves. So the flimsy door locks of 19th century homes, and the wager that perhaps Weston will not feel like committing sexual assault for the next three or four years, would have to be enough. Mortensen invites these questions on purpose. He’s already played the shining hero Aragorn. Now he’s interested in playing a man who is insufficiently worried about his wife, sacrificing one set of morals for another.
The tendency to drift into poetic forms of expression while discussing The Dead Don’t Hurt speaks well of it. It isn’t in the same category of achievement as certain iconic westerns or western-adjacent films that explore similar themes, such as No Country for Old Men or the aforementioned Unforgiven. But it needn’t be to make us ponder our own tenuous line between life and death, and what we will value most before we cross it.
The Dead Don’t Hurt opens in cinemas today.