'The Dead Don't Hurt' Review

The Dead Don’t Hurt opens with two simultaneous scenes of death. In one, a person peacefully draws their last breath as they lie in the home they built with their own two hands and are surrounded by the family they raised. In the other, a gunman mercilessly kills everyone in a saloon before hightailing it out of town. It’s in these two scenes that writer/director Viggo Mortensen illustrates the juxtaposing ideals of the old American West: a place where you can build something for yourself out of nothing, and also have it all taken away in a heartbeat.

Not to be outdone by Bradley Cooper last year with Maestro; Mortensen also produces, stars, and composes the score for his second feature at the helm after 2020’s Falling. And if that wasn’t enough, he also made the film in an atypical fashion by composing the score first and then shooting it to fit the musical cues. The necessity of the move is debatable and fully impossible to notice while watching the film, but the fact that it happened adds to Mortensen’s stance as an icon for the films that hang just outside the Hollywood sphere. Could you guess what his highest-grossing film is when you exclude The Lord of the Rings trilogy? It’s Green Book… and it’s not even close.

Mortensen isn’t the sole star of his own revisionist western, as Vicky Krieps takes over the first-billed position. She plays Vivienne Le Coudy, a French-Canadian who was introduced as a child to the harsh realities of frontier life when her father was killed and left hanging on a tree by the British. And now, she’s betrothed to a British man in San Francisco, only this one will likely kill her through the boredom of high society. That’s how the charmingly rugged Danish cowboy Holger Olsen (Mortensen) catches her eye one day (I mean, who could resist Viggo?). “Come with me,” he asks her as he returns to his home at the edge of the world, a quiet and peaceful dusty homestead near a stereotypical Old West town.

The coupling of these two characters is where The Dead Don’t Hurt really makes its mark. Krieps carries a sturdy poise throughout, while Mortensen is a man who, despite being a decorated soldier from his homeland, would much rather build barns and plant gardens than fire a weapon. Mortensen’s soft score accents these tender moments, and Marcel Zyskind’s camera always seems to find the magic hour within the California landscape.

It’s the moments of commerciality, such as Garret Dillahunt as the unruly son of the town’s richest man and the staging of the action scenes, that bring everything back down below the surface. Dillahunt doesn’t have the presence to be an intimidating villain, with his all-black outfit doing all of the heavy lifting to communicate your attitude towards him. He’s part of some boilerplate conspiracy by the town’s mayor (played by Danny Huston) to hold a monopoly over its limited resources. It’s clear that Mortensen cared the least about this subplot when writing and filming it, so there’s no need to bother with it.

A more interesting mistake comes in the form of the jumbled editing, which, if my memory serves me well, tries to cut between three different timelines: Vivienne’s childhood, her and Holger’s early days together, and then many years down the road. There’s no forward momentum or narrative secrets unlocked through the cross-cutting between these scenes, only a small sense of confusion about what’s happening and when.

The (minor) works of John Ford and Howard Hawks would be an apt comparison to make for The Dead Don’t Hurt. Along with Kevin Costner’s supposed Horizon: An American Saga quadrilogy, this could mark a miniature comeback for the Western genre. Mortensen has just supplied the intimacy, now we’ll have to wait and see what Costner has to say about our nation’s past.