A tender love story and a subversive Western: NPR

Viggo Mortensen plays Holger Olsen in Deaths don’t hurt.

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One of the many charms of Dead people don’t hurt is that we cannot immediately tell whether it is an old-fashioned or a revisionist western. It has many familiar genre trappings: men on horses across rugged landscapes, a bloody saloon shootout, and two actors, Viggo Mortensen and Vicky Krieps, who bring traditional movie star charisma to a tender story of love.

But the film seems subversive at times. The first of these riders we see is not a cowboy but a knight in shining armor – a figure out of a child’s fantastical dream. And then there’s the way the film plays with time: this shootout, which technically occurs at the end of the story, is instead shown at the very beginning.

Mortensen, who wrote and directed the film, trusts us that we know the western well enough to be able to play with the form without losing focus. It doesn’t attempt to radically reinvent the genre, but it uses its conventions to tell a different, politically resonant story.

It is particularly significant that the two main characters are both immigrants. Mortensen plays Holger Olsen, an itinerant carpenter of Danish descent who ends up in San Francisco in the 1860s. It’s there that he meets Vivienne, a French-Canadian florist, played by Krieps, who is just as independent-minded as him.

Vicky Krieps is a French-Canadian florist in Deaths don’t hurt.

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The two fall in love, and Vivienne moves with Olsen to a dusty Nevada town called Elk Flats. Because the story is told out of order, we already know that bad things are afoot, but for now the mood is light and even comical as Vivienne moodily sets about tidying up her cabin in drink.

Vivienne is not the type to be confined to the house and she quickly gets a job as a bartender at the saloon, where she catches the attention of one of the meanest customers in town: Weston Jeffries, played by Solly McLeod , the brutal son of a rich rancher. Meanwhile, with the Civil War underway, Olsen decides to join the Union Army, much to Vivienne’s fury.

One of the best things about Dead people don’t hurt is that it honors Vivienne’s courage and abilities while recognizing how alone and vulnerable she is in this hostile, male-dominated environment. Several months after Olsen’s departure, Vivienne gives birth to a little boy in circumstances shrouded in mystery. Years later, Olsen returns to Vivienne and the child, but their reunion is not entirely happy, and they face a dark reckoning with the city and some of its most corrupt individuals.

Mortensen made his directorial debut with the 2020 drama Fall, in which he plays a gay man trying to care for his ill, bigoted father. With Dead people don’t hurt, it uses a story set in the past to comment on issues that are still present in the present, from male violence against women to the complexity of immigrants’ relationships with their adopted country. Even as Vivienne embraces her life as an American settler, she proudly clings to her French-Canadian roots, sometimes dreamily recalling the stories her mother told her about Joan of Arc – an obvious hero for a woman trying to forging your own unorthodox path through life.

As a director, Mortensen treats the subject with quiet assurance; even when he travels through time, he never loses the narrative thread. He also gives a smooth performance as Olsen, an honest man who sometimes makes impulsive and rash decisions.

But ultimately it’s Krieps’ film. She has often portrayed women chafing at their forbidden positions in life, in dramas like Phantom Thread and Bodice. Here she captures the indomitable spirit of a woman making her way in a foreign land and determined to find and nurture beauty even in the most difficult circumstances.