Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.“Is it the end of the world?” a young boy asks a grizzled Viggo Mortensen in grown-up morality tale The Dead Don’t Hurt. The scene recalls The Road, John Hillcoat’s ashen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, in which Mortensen starred. But here the actor is director too — and the timeframe is past, not future. The film is a Western, and unafraid of that. Almost instantly, it sets us before swinging saloon doors, with guns drawn and fired, before a figure in black leaves town on horseback.Mortensen has cast himself as sheriff: Holger Olsen, a dry Dane in a corrupt patch of 1860s Nevada called Elk Flats. But no sooner is a miscarriage of justice under way, over his head, than the film starts to bend into surprising shapes. Now we cut to Vicky Krieps, bored in genteel San Francisco. Her character is Vivienne Le Coudy, a free-spirited French-Canadian. In a movie that plays delicate games with time, we realise we have rewound to before that early scene of Old West violence.Olsen is now re-encountered in California, making an immediate match with Vivienne. Their first meeting is a charmer, but the strength of the film is how confidently it lets them add up into a couple afterwards, the sum of directorial patience and fine-grained performances. The pair come to make absolute sense together, each here in America without either being quite yet American. Eventually, a home is set up — in distant Elk Flats. A frontier idyll unfolds — for a while.But with civil war raging, Olsen soon makes a momentous decision, one you might see as brave, selfish or both. As a director, Mortensen tends to the nerveless. The portrait of Elk Flats power brokers is blunt, but the movie also strikes a careful balance of this and that. Beautifully photographed, the Nevada rockscape looks as stark as it must have done to early settlers, but without stealing attention from what is, at heart, an actor’s piece. And for all Mortensen’s charisma, the story is really that of Vivienne. As such, the film belongs to Krieps, conjuring her character whole from a thousand tiny moments.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from June 7, and in US cinemas now
