Viggo Mortensen’s contemplative western opens with a death. It’s not a violent, high-noon ending but a sombre domestic scene in which a Danish immigrant, Holger Olsen (Mortensen, who also wrote, directed and composed the music), tends to his wife, Vivienne LeCoudy (Vicky Krieps). Skilful cuts by the film’s editor, Peder Pedersen, jump from Vivienne’s Quebecois frontier childhood and the couple’s first meeting.
Holger is a carpenter and former soldier who first encounters Vivienne, as a free-spirited flower-seller, on a journey to San Francisco – “the ends of the Earth”. She promptly ditches her well-heeled gentleman caller (Colin Morgan) and heads to the dusty Nevada town of Elk Flats, where she and Holger settle before his conscience takes him to the front lines of the American civil war.
“This is the place you chose?” she asks as she arrives at her unadorned homestead. “Of all the places you’ve seen?”
His absence leaves her at the mercy of a town bullyboy, Weston (Solly McLeod), a rapist and killer who is protected by his landowning father (Garret Dillahunt) and the corrupt local mayor (Danny Huston).
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In Vivienne, Krieps has her best showcase since Phantom Thread, wherein the smallest raised eyebrow speaks volumes. “I will miss you,” he tells her. “I hope so,” she replies, drily.
Mortensen’s script tussles between feminist revision and old-school male showdowns, imagining Vivienne as a Joan of Arc-inspired frontierswoman yet subject to the degradations of the era. Her body is both autonomous and contested. That tension adds grace notes to the inevitable revenge cycle.
Mortensen, who has previously channelled and reworked western tropes in The Road and Jauja, assembles a crack team of character actors to play such profession-denoted characters as the reverend, the fishmonger and the barkeeper. A tense, succinct courtroom scene introduces the black hats, the mob and the judge (Roy McKinnon). The barroom is similarly politicised.
Marcel Zyskind’s blazing cinematography counterpoints the melancholy.
The Dead Don’t Hurt is in cinemas from Friday, June 7th
