FILM REVIEW: The Dead Don’t Hurt (2023)

A quiet, pretty, poetic Western with Viggo Mortensen and Vicky Krieps. This is a European-style love story set against the background of the 19th century American West where dusty villages sprung up around craggy rocks and bleached valleys.

One of those villages is where the lovers settle, but called off by dreams of adventure and war, Viggo’s character leaves his partner Vivienne undefended at the homestead. She’s a feisty, feminist sort of woman and handles herself well, but the village lives at the mercy of a well-connected psycho (played by Orkney lad Solly McLeod) who makes life hell for the rest of the townsfolk. This ticking timebomb gives the movie its dramatic element.

There are some interesting touches in the film like how Vivienne reacts when her lover returns after many years at war. She doesn’t run up and greet him, instead it’s awkward between them, as it often is when two people who loved each other, but who have been separated for years, meet again.

Viggo stars in the film and is also the Director, the writer and the composer, which is, by itself, a remarkable achievement. The story jumps around the timeline, starting near the end then retelling the story, and mirroring past and future scenes one after the other. Viggo compares it to real life, saying when something happens which is bad or sad, we look back and work out how it happened.

And he’s back to working with horses. He loves all animals, and famously bought the horses he rode in The Lord of the Rings films. Those horses had to be trained to deal with not only warlike scenes and fighting chaos, such as being charged at by orcs, but also lights, loud noises and all kinds of unpredictability. Viggo also managed to procure his sword from The Lord of the Rings to use in The Dead Don’t Hurt.

Viggo loved Westerns since he was a boy, when they were more popular than now, and wanted to make a classic, visual Western, except he was keen to put a woman at the centre of it rather than a man. And that is what he has done, Krieps is great as Vivienne, a realistic woman not a superwoman gunslinger, and he is perfect as a humble, reluctant hero.