Is that a medieval knight riding through the forest that starts this Western?
Yep. It’s a part of the split narrative employed in Viggo Mortensen’s revenge tragedy, THE DEAD DON’T HURT.
THE DEAD DON’T HURT, just like Romeo and Juliet, is a story of star-crossed lovers on the western U.S. frontier in the 1860s. Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) is a fiercely independent woman who embarks on a relationship with Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen).
After meeting Olsen in San Francisco, where she is a florist, and he is a carpenter, she agrees to travel with him to his home near the quiet town of Elk Flats, Nevada, where they start a life together.
With the outbreak of the civil war, Olsen, a veteran of the Danish armed forces, makes a fateful decision to fight for the Union. This leaves Vivienne to fend for herself in a place controlled by corrupt Mayor Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston) and his unscrupulous business partner, powerful rancher Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt).
Alfred’s violent, wayward son Weston, played with all the black clad, hiss the villain stereo type, big hat, no cattle villainy by Solly McLeod, aggressively pursues Vivienne, who is determined to resist his unwanted advances, but to no avail. He is a privileged and entitled male and he will have his way.
When Olsen returns from the war, he and Vivienne must confront the ramifications of rape, pregnancy and syphilis.
THE DEAD DON’T HURT is a portrait of a passionate woman determined to stand up for herself in an unforgiving world dominated by ruthless men.
Vicky Krieps, that rarest kind of actress, a woman generalised yet microscopically observed, symbol and individual fused in perfect and passionate mating. Instinctively honourable yet stricken with pure anger, her face speaks intelligent anguish. She has that quality of a woman who could tend a garden bed or burn at the stake without a change of vocation.
As with other male co stars, Mortensen struggles to hold the stage with her, and is absent for a good deal of the picture, letting her strength and sublime cinematic presence shoulder the dramatic arcs and bridges.
