Movie Review: The Dead Don’t Hurt

The Dead Don’t Hurt is Oscar-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen’s second directorial effort following 2020’s Falling and while it is an improvement from Falling, I still find myself struggling with Mortensen as a director. Though shot well with some good performances, The Dead Don’t Hurt never fully clicked for me and ended up being a film I found mostly boring despite some moments of greatness.

The Dead Don’t Hurt is a western and love story about Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) and Holger Olsen (Mortensen). The film opens with Vivienne dying in bed. We don’t know what caused her death, but this causes Olsen and their son to flee their home and go on an adventure away from their small and violent San Francisco town. The film jumps back and forth in time to show Vivienne and Holger’s story while also showing us Holger’s journey following Vivienne’s death. We see how Vivienne and Holger met, the blossoming of their relationship, Holger leaving Vivienne for years to enlist in the Civil War and the repercussions of her living alone.

The Dead Don’t Hurt is a good-looking movie and has the essential tropes of a Western. Mortensen transports us to 1860s San Francisco with authentic set design and costumes. In classic Western form, the town where Holger is Sherrif and where Vivienne works as a bar server is corrupt, violent, and dirty. It features some nice people, but there’s a lot of scum in this town, most notably Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), who is one of the most despicable characters I have seen in a Western in a long time. The film even features some cool Western shoot-outs that offer brief moments of excitement.

But where The Dead Don’t Hurt lost me was in its story, most specifically the execution of it. The film’s opening with Vivienne’s death made it hard to connect with her as a character because we already knew her fate. Krieps gives a wonderful performance, but I was never attached to her emotionally, even when things get bad for her while Holger is away at war. The non-linear structure of the film was unnecessary and ultimately did not work. I understand the idea of wanting to do something unconventional, especially when it came to a genre like the Western which has been around forever and reinvented dozens of times, but conventionally telling the story would have been more effective and emotional. Vivienne’s death would have been more powerful, her love story with Holger would have been more powerful and sweeping, and the finale would have landed harder.

Through two films Mortensen has shown that he is a very capable director. The Dead Don’t Hurt is a step up from his debut and shows that he has a keen visual eye and can conjure up good performances from his actors. His storytelling ability leaves something to be desired, however, and that’s what ultimately keeps The Dead Don’t Hurt from being a great movie.

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