Chicago Critics Film Festival 2024 Review: The Dead Don't Hurt

I suppose you have to give Viggo Mortensen’s Western drama “The Dead Don’t Hurt” some credit. It starts with one cliche, and it goes out with another. Such consistency feels woefully misdirected however, even when nonlinear storytelling can add at least some freshness.

Mortensen, who directed, wrote, and also composed the music for this romantic, ruminative tale of crime and corruption, also undoubtedly believes he deserves some congratulations for giving Vicky Krieps most of the movie’s time and attention when his gallantly tender cowboy Holger joins the fight against slavery, while her Vivienne is left to fight a private war of her own on their isolated Nevada homestead. 

Even if the movie begins with her tragic end, it’s impossible not to get invested in her, with Vivienne’s aura of fiercely understated independence and her childhood spent in the forest with her widowed mother that also doubles as a rumination/thesis of how women tend to live alongside nature and men tend to conquer it…or at least think they do. It’s also where the first fly in the ointment makes its buzzing appearance, with its contemplation of how women and men differ when they chose to do battle.

The very great advantage lies in the fact that “The Dead Don’t Hurt” refuses to overstate anything by say, making use of narration, a fortuitous turn since it can’t seem to imagine Vivienne as anything other than tragic. If she believably refuses to define herself by what is inflicted upon her, the movie sure as hell does, and it’s up to the almost perfect Holger to do something about it.

“The Dead” may give Vivienne a vibrant and rich inner life and backstory, yet it’s unable to imagine her doing anything to avenge herself. It wouldn’t be easy given that she’s surrounded by the usual cardboard villains, the most irredeemably evil of which even dresses in black, rides a black horse, and is her main, most direct abuser. The suffering he inflicts on her has long term ramifications, some of which don’t surface until Holger returns home to discover the true extent of them, throwing the life the two manage to build in spite of everything into ruins. 

Such wrongs require a righting of some kind, even if Holger is too invested in living peacefully at this point to do it. His status as a virtuous man demands no less, but the plot does - there’s a final showdown to be had. So much potential, and yet what a lack of imagination when death must still be the final mandated refuge for a woman’s suffering.

Grade: C-