The Dead Don’t Hurt review | Peter Bradshaw’s film

The star directs, writes, composes and acts in this beautifully shot and sombre film about an old-school hero in a 19th-century frontier community fraught with tragedy

This sinewy, sombre, handsomely crafted and beautifully shot western is Viggo Mortensen’s second feature as a director, an impressively authored movie in which Mortensen is also writer, composer and star. With almost anyone else that might be the recipe for narcissism, and yet the self-effacing and even reticent quality in Mortensen’s screen presence works against that danger. He is, however, certainly working within the traditional strong, silent template of the old-school western hero.

Holger Olsen (played by Mortensen) is a Danish immigrant to the United States of the 1860s, who finds himself in San Francisco – a carpenter, rough-hewn outdoorsman and military veteran. He finds himself meeting the frank, unabashed gaze of Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) a French-Canadian woman of modest means but independent temperament, who has just broken off an understanding with a wealthy but obnoxious man (Colin Morgan).

Olsen and Vivienne move in together in Olsen’s shack just outside a distant frontier town, and Vivienne is soon going to give birth to a son. But before their family responsibilities arise, Vivienne finds herself a job in the town’s saloon bar, where she comes into fateful contact with the town’s weaselly mayor, Rudolph Schiller (soft-spoken Danny Huston). Schiller is complicit in the unlawful affairs of the town’s crooked land baron, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), and always ready to turn a blind eye to the behaviour of Jeffries’s psychotically violent son, Weston (Solly McLeod). As the civil war approaches, the tensions within this frontier community come to the surface.

The Dead Don’t Hurt screened at the Toronto film festival, and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 7 June.