Dead provides unique portrait of courage
Viggo Mortensen’s modest The Dead Don’t Hurt attempts to provide another perspective on western heroism, putting its female protagonist front and center, focusing on the unsung trials she and her brethren had to face. To be sure, the script still contains its fair share of genre tropes, yet by including an additional point of view, the result is a richer, more introspective genre entry.
Mortensen, who also wrote the screenplay, employs a sliding storyline in which scenes of the present alternate with those of the past. Although initially off-putting, the result is a story that’s far more emotionally resonant than standard oaters. Olson (Mortensen) has immigrated to America and has built a good life for himself. Settling in southern Nevada, he has a small house on the outskirts of the nearest town but has a wandering spirit. As such, he gets the urge to travel about and during a stay in San Francisco, he meets Vivienne (Vicky Krieps), a fiercely independent woman who suffers no fools. She sees straight away that they are kindred spirits and agrees to marry him.
However, she’s less than impressed when she first sees the modest, remote home where they will be living. And just as they have settled into a routine, Olson informs her that he will be enlisting in the Union Army, enticed by a $100 signing bonus and the belief that fighting for the end of slavery is just. Left on her own, Vivienne is forced to eke out a living on their hardscrabble farm. Looking for employment, she heads to Elk Flats, where she finds a job in the local saloon. And while this helps her get by, she comes to the attention of Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), an unstable, violent young man whose father, Alfred (Garret Dillahunt), a powerful rancher, enables his son by making sure the local law enforcement looks the other way when he steps over the line. Having Mayor Schiller (Danny Huston) as a business partner helps.
The raw production design helps ground the story, but it’s the performances between the two leads that provide the film with its heart. Mortensen and Krieps are masterful in their subtle approaches. What with both characters being repressed, they convey their thoughts and emotions in a quiet manner, implying rather than stating what is on their minds and in their hearts. Their attraction to one another is evident, as is their strength. It’s to Mortensen’s credit that he often steps to the side, allowing Krieps to shine, her Vivienne the personification of tenacity and strength, a performance in which little seems to be done but much is communicated.
The film stumbles a bit when it focuses on the familiar. The requisite villain is far too broadly drawn, while the solution as to how to deal with him is obvious, but never taken. Gunfights take place, chases ensue and corruption is exposed. Mortensen knows he’s traveling in familiar narrative territory in these moments and at least these scenes are rendered sharply and not dwelled upon. And while Dead leaves the viewer with a portrait of courage, it comes from a non-traditional source, this revisionist effort shining a light on those settlers who have been too often taken for granted and relegated to the background. In theaters.
Unique approach makes for unnerving Nature
Having gotten a rapturous reception at various film festivals, Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature is being touted as a piece of art house horror, a film cut from the same cloth as The Blair Witch Project or The Witch. To be sure, it does contain elements that would justify this, the filmmaker creating a genuinely unnerving sense of time and place that elevates it above similar efforts. However, the effort to put Nature on equal footing as the two previously mentioned classics is a bit of a reach. For all the obvious skill that has gone into it, there’s little in the way of radical redesign where its plot is concerned. That being said, when Nash employs a subtle approach, the movie is at its most effective. It’s only when he gives in to his most base artistic instincts that he hobbles this effort.
To his credit, Nash dispenses with the genre tropes quickly. A group of teens, camping in the Canadian wilderness, stumble upon a ruined structure in the woods, in the middle of which is a metal pool from which hangs a gold chain and locket. Impulsively, one of them takes this tattered piece of jewelry, in the process paving the way for the resurrection of an unstoppable evil. Only later, around an appropriately creepy campfire, are we told the Legend of Johnny, an overgrown, “mentally hindered” teenager who was brutally killed by a group of lumberjacks from the area…or so they thought. Seems he was able to exact revenge on his killers, a slaughter known to the locals as the White Pines Massacre, before being taken down and interred far in the woods, his mother’s necklace hung over his grave, keeping him in check.
More of the backstory is provided later but it is typical of slasher movies of this sort – it holds no water, and it is of little consequence. All that’s important in slasher films and to their fans is that there’s an unstoppable killer on the loose and grisly murders are in the offing. This isn’t initially the case, as Johnny’s first victim, who has the temerity to be living in his family’s long-abandoned house, is done with relative taste and restraint. Unfortunately, this is not to last, Johnny’s handiwork becoming increasingly vile and disturbing. One of the kills is particularly outlandish and grotesque, but the online response to it by slasher fans is of the greatest concern, their praise for this sort of gruesomeness, disturbing.
Yet, Nash creates a seductive approach with two obvious, subtle choices. There is no music in the movie, no thundering, ironic score to punctuate the violence or announce Johnny’s arrival. The result is jarring, the absence of the expected aural cues creating a sense of realism that gets under your skin and only highlights the brutality on display. This is coupled with Nash’s decision to keep the camera constantly behind Johnny, so that we share his perspective throughout. This creates a sense of shared identity between killer and viewer, the result being an uneasy kind of sympathy for him.
These two very simple techniques make for an, at times, genuinely unnerving experience. Ironically, at times it makes for a dull one as well. Traipsing around all day and half the night with a member of the undead is rather monotonous. Still and all, Nash’s less-is-more approach in generating an eerie mood and unique perspective proves effective. Had he taken the same approach where the film’s violence is concerned, then Nature may have in fact been considered a work of art. In theaters.
This article appears in High expectations.
