The young girl has a vision. A knight in shining armor riding a horse in a forest approaches. But the vision ends there. “I never wanted to be rescued,” the woman says much later in life.

She is Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps), and she will suffer no man. While in pre-Civil War San Francisco, she spies a man in a hat lounging next to his horse. He isn’t a cowboy—he’s a carpenter—but he looks like one. She’s smitten with him, and he with her. She invites him to an art gallery where the man, Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen), looks and feels very much out of place. Then Vivienne’s previous caller approaches and thanks her for coming to his home for the show. The sight of Olsen emasculates him, and Vivienne leaves giggling.

The Dead Don’t Hurt, written and directed by Mortensen, is a straightforward and honest western with an unusual structure. The movie opens with Vivienne dead and Olsen returning home to bury her. The mayor (Danny Houston) offers his condolences and asks for Olsen’s help in a murder trial. A man has killed six in broad daylight, and Olsen is the town sheriff. Olsen knows the man about to be hanged isn’t the culprit. We know he’s not, too, because Mortensen, the director, shows us a shot of Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), clad in all black, gunning the six men down.

Working with editor Peder Pedersen, Mortensen has an unusual relationship with time. Most of The Dead Don’t Hurt is flashbacks of Vivienne and Olsen meeting, falling in love, and building a home together—one of the best scenes in the movie is Vivienne’s long journey through gorgeous mountain scenery only to arrive at a dusty house on a rocky outcropping. “Here?” she asks. “You built your house here?”

Mortensen doesn’t approach these flashbacks linearly or with any signifiers, and that includes the misery Weston heaps upon Vivienne while Olsen is away at war. Just straight cuts into the past and straight cuts back out with Olsen and his young son (Eliana Michaud) tracking Weston down.

This structure might be the only thing unconventional about The Dead Don’t Hurt. It’s refreshing to watch a movie in 2024 that use the western genre without subverting it, inverting it, or reinventing it. You can tell Mortensen has a deep love for these kinds of movies. He knows their simplicity as character pieces are where they draw their strength.

The Dead Don’t Hurt (2023)
Written and directed by Viggo Mortensen
Produced by Viggo Mortensen, Regina Solórzano, Jeremy Thomas
Starring: Vicky Krieps, Viggo Mortensen, Solly McLeod, Garret Dillahunt, W. Earl Brown, Danny Huston, Eliana Michaud
Shout! Studios, Rated R, Running time 129 minutes, Premiered Sept. 8, 2023, at the Toronto International Film Festival

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