Film Review: The Dead Don’t Hurt is an ambitious Western that thrives on its emotional intelligence

"Viggo Mortensen, who also writes and directs, frames his story as a revenge narrative: It begins with Olsen burying his wife and turning in his sheriff’s badge, before trotting off..."

The Dead Don't Hurt

• The Dead Don’t Hurt 
• ★★★★☆
• Cinematic release

It may have a B-movie title, but The Dead Don’t Hurt (15A) is an ambitious Western that thrives on its emotional intelligence.

The set-up is a cliché: The weatherbeaten, monosyllabic Olsen (Viggo Mortensen), sheriff of a small Nevada town, finds himself up against the grasping rancher Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt) and his murderous son, Weston (Solly McLeod), with whom the town’s grasping mayor Schiller (Danny Huston) is in cahoots.

Mortensen, who also writes and directs, frames his story as a revenge narrative: It begins with Olsen burying his wife and turning in his sheriff’s badge, before trotting off, with his young son, Vincent (Atlas Green), clinging gamely to his saddle’s pommel, in pursuit of the sociopathic Weston.

Most of the film takes place in extended flashbacks, however, where we meet its true centre, Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps), an unconventional young woman who throws off the trappings of urban civilisation to join Olsen in the Nevada wilderness.

Krieps is brilliantly cast as the spiky, non-conforming Vivienne who, in her refusal to toe the line and behave as a good little pioneer woman should, unwittingly casts herself as the civilising influence in a community cowed by brutality, bullets, and a contempt for law and justice.

Weston Jeffries is a rather one-dimensional villain and the role requires little more than deranged snarling from Solly McLeod.

But Mortensen provides Krieps with solid support in his role as the noble, but flawed, Olsen.