The Dead Don’t Hurt

★★★✩✩

Reviewed by John Nathan

When Viggo Mortensen is confronted by men who intend harm, the aggressors will wish they had picked on someone else. This law of nature was memorably demonstrated in his 2005 movie A History of Violence. It serves as a reassuring inevitability during this Western in which unjust death is followed by unjust death.

Set in 19th-century small-town Idaho the second film to be both written and directed by Mortensen is brimful of familiar Western tropes. Mortensen’s carpenter Olsen is a grizzled yet good-hearted loner living in little more than a shack. The nearby town is terrorised by Weston, the sadistic son (well played by Solly McLeod) of a local corrupt bigwig. The son’s entrance into his every scene is heralded by the clomp of his boots and tinkle of his spurs. He wears black like a baddy and we first encounter him shooting up the saloon, a spree in which six are killed. An innocent man with learning difficulties is later hanged for the crime. The sham court hearing is a black comedy of kangaroo justice. All this we have seen before in one form or another.

Less typical of the genre is that Olsen is Danish and that his solitude ends during a trip to San Francisco he meets the excellent Vicky Krieps’s French-born Vivienne. In an incongruous restaurant scene she leaves the boring fop who is courting her and is later drawn to the ten gallon hat-wearing alpha male sitting on the waterfront.

She turns Olsen’s shack into a country cottage and their idyll life is interrupted by the civil war which Olsen joins because “slavery is wrong”. We know from flashbacks that Vivienne’s rage about that decision is rooted in what happened to her father when he decided to leave home to fight the English during the War of Independence. They hanged him from a tree in the forest.

But least typical of all is the time-shifting editing. The film opens with Vivienne’s death, a moment defined with a heartbreaking tear that escapes one of her lifeless eyes and rolls down her cheek. Their young son helps Olsen bury the boy’s mother in the garden that used to be scrubland before she came along. What happened earlier and what happens next are joined together in a stream of past and present that is so seamless much of the tension is derived not from plot but from wondering where the hell we are in the story’s timeline. Vivienne we learn was raped by Weston when Olsen was away. The boy is the rapist’s son.

Publicity material tells us the film “a tragic love story” featuring “a passionate woman determined to stand up for herself in world dominated by ruthless men”. But the film is at its most tender and interesting when it explores whether Olsen can reconcile his responsibility to the boy knowing that he is the son of the man who raped his wife. What makes a father?