Rent The Dead Don't Hurt (2023)

Intriguing Western Romance - The Dead Don't Hurt review by GI

This slow burning frontier western from writer, director, actor and composer Viggo Mortensen is rather an intriguing film. All the tropes of the western are present, revenge, violence, corruption, but delivered in a narrative that has a gentle rather beautiful arc, all delivered with a great visual eye and wonderful characters many of whom are also typical, such as the weasly Town Mayor (Danny Huston), the corrupt land baron (Garret Dillahunt), and the psychotic violent son (Solly McLeod). However this is a story of French Canadian immigrant Vivienne (Vicky Krieps), a fiercely independent woman who breaks off a relationship with a wealthy man to take up with Olsen (Mortensen), a Danish immigrant who takes her to his small shack in Nevada where they live in relative peace near the local town dominated by the Jeffries clan (Dillahunt and McLeod). When the Civil War breaks out Olsen heads off to war leaving Vicky alone and where she receives the unwelcome attention of the younger Jeffries. The ingredients of the western are all here but they are presented in a structure that weaves between different time lines that may jar at first but soon fall carefully into place. Mortensen presents the wild violence of frontier life in the 1860s but weaves the unique romance of the two main characters into it in a story that inevitably heads for tragedy. In that sense this is a rather compelling western made by a filmmaker who's self effacing nature leads to a fulfilling film.