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The Frozen Dead

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Cast & crew, herbert j. leder, dana andrews, philip gilbert, kathleen breck, karel stepanek, technical specs.

At the end of World War II, 1,500 of Hitler's top officials were frozen alive and hidden in caves. Former Nazis Dr. Norberg and his aide, Karl Essen, are conducting revivification experiments at a manor in the English countryside. Although they have been successful in restoring body functions, they have been unable to revive the brain. They explain to visiting ex-Wehrmacht officer General Lubeck that they need a live brain with which to experiment. Consequently, when Norberg's niece, Jean, arrives from the United States with her college friend Elsa, the sadistic Essen disposes of Elsa but keeps her decapitated head alive in a laboratory cabinet. Although Jean is told that her friend had to leave suddenly for London, the young girl is unconvinced and reveals her suspicions to Ted Roberts, an American scientist. Roberts is permitted by Norbert to view the severed head, and he agrees to keep the secret. Meanwhile, Elsa's brain is developing a telepathic rapport with Jean in order to warn her that her life is in danger. After Lubeck has concluded that Essen is a security risk and ordered him put into the deep-freeze chamber, Jean sneaks into the laboratory and discovers Elsa's head. When Lubeck aims a gun at her, Norberg intervenes on behalf of his niece. As they engage in a death struggle, Elsa's brain activates a collection of electronically-controlled dismembered arms which reach out and strangle the two ex-Nazis.

Basil Henson

Alan tilvern, oliver macgreevy, charles wade, davis boulton, eric carter, mary gibson, robert goldstein, doug hermes, ronnie maasz, scott macgregor, philip martell, tom simpson, doreen soan, kevin sutton, pearl tipaldi.

Released in Great Britain in Eastmancolor in 1967.

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The Frozen Dead (1966)

Genre: horror / scifi, duration: 95 minuten, alternative title: kasteel voor monsters, country: united kingdom, directed by: herbert j. leder, stars: dana andrews , philip gilbert and anna palk, imdb score: 5,0  (1.065), releasedate: 15 october 1966.

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The Frozen Dead plot

"Chiller Of The Year! Fiends frozen dead at the height of their diabolical powers and brought back alive years later" A mad scientist has succeeded in developing a method to keep the heads of deceased persons alive. He has come up with a plan to keep track of the minds of some Nazi criminals. When he finds the suitable bodies, he will attach the heads to them.

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The movie was filmed at Merton Park Studios in London. It was shot in Eastmancolour and shown in colour in theatres in the U.K. and on U.S. television. However, in theatres in the U.S., it was shown in black-and-white, allegedly to 'save money duplicating prints'. The film is a co-production of Gold Star Productions, Ltd. and Seven Arts Productions. Gold Star's only other film is It!, the companion film to The Frozen Dead in the U.S.

The Frozen Dead is the first film in which Edward Fox received an on-screen credit, although he had been in three previous films.

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Movie Review: The Frozen Dead

(1966) Directed by Herbert J. Leder Starring Dana Andrews, Anna Palk, Philip Gilbert, Kathleen Breck, Karel Stepanek, Basil Henson, Alan Tilvern, Ann Tirard

There are those films we first see in our youth that sent a sense of awe through our brain, as well as chills down your spine. A time way before we’re smart enough to know whether something could really happen or not, or how far science could really go, when most concepts or ideas where completely new and therefore fascinating to our young minds, sparking that imagination. That is when I first experienced The Frozen Dead . I can remember telling the kids on the playground the next day at school, about a wall of arms that were still alive, or Nazi soldiers that could only comb their hair or bounce an imaginary ball, or even more exciting, a decapitated head that was STILL ALIVE!!! Years or maybe even decades later when we see these films again, we’re a little ashamed to think that it was it was that amazing at the time. But others, like this particular film, even though it might be a little silly or even outrageous, it still impresses me.

The film was written, directed, and produced by Herbert J. Leder, who didn’t work that long in the industry. In fact, besides writing Fiend Without a Face (1958) and writing, directing, and producing It! (1967), starring Roddy McDowall, the following year, he only directed three other feature films. Which is a shame, I feel, because with It! and The Frozen Dead , they were two fond memories from my childhood. While critics even today might say that it is boring, or with comments like it should have stayed frozen, there are a few besides me that have a fondness for it. In his book Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film , Michael Weldon calls The Frozen Dead “an incredible film”, as well as being “an unheralded wonder of silliness.” So, there you go. I loved them then, and I still do now.

Dana Andrews plays Dr. Norberg, a Nazi doctor hiding out incognito in England as he continues his experiments on being able to freeze a human body, sort of like in cryogenic status, which he has done with several German soldiers at the end of WWII. The idea is to bring back the “party” at the right time to take control. The only problem is that the good doctor hasn’t exactly perfected the part about bringing these frozen bodies back to life, at least with them having complete motor functions and the full use of their brain. So far, the ones he’s brought back only remember one thing, such as one soldier constantly combs his hair, while another constantly cries out in sadness. On a side note, he also has a wall of severed arms that are able to move through electronic impulses. Not sure what all this has to do with cryogenics, but who cares. A wall of arms was pretty damn cool when you were a kid!

But just when some higher ups in the Nazi party pay a visit to the doctor to see his progress, progress that was falsely stated by his devious assistant Essen, played wonderfully by Alan Tilvern, and unexpected visit from his niece and her friend throw a wrench into everything. Essen devises a plan on his own to get rid of the niece’s friend, as well as getting a severed head the doctor needed to continue the research on bringing back the soldiers with full brain capacity. This results in one of the films best developments, when the severed head is alive and starts to communicate.

Now, Andrews, who had become a big star after the film Laura (1944), had a long career but battled alcoholism the later part of it. In fact, he was one of the first celebrities to speak out publicly about the evils of it. As far as the horror genre, besides The Frozen Dead , and an appearance in The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery , Andrews only really appeared in one other genre title, and it was a big one, Night of the Demon (1957). In Frozen , he doesn’t skip out on his performance, no matter the subject matter or how downright silly some of it seems, it took the role completely serious, even with the slight German accent. Sure, while he does play it somewhat for sympathy, he does take his role in the science more importantly than his thought for human life.

Anna Palk plays Andrews’ niece, who does an okay job here, but really isn’t given much to do other than have either different emotional reactions, or just seem like she’s staring off into space. But it is Kathleen Breck, who plays her friend and meets a grisly end, who really shines here. Yes, most of her screen time is as a decapitated head, but it her performance that gives the viewers the most lasting images.

But for a young horror fan, it was probably the work of Art Director and Production Designer Scott MacGregor that fascinated me the most, even though I never realized it at the time. One can only assume it was MacGregor that created not only the doctor’s lab, but also the wall of arms, the frozen body chamber, as well as how to pull off the talking severed head on the table. There is obviously an optical shot in when we see the full shot of the head on the table with nothing underneath it, hiding the Breck’s body. Sure, looking at it now, it can look a bit dated, but back in the early ‘70s, it was pretty damn effective. And looking at it now, it takes me back to a time when you were watching this stuff with a much younger and more open mind than now.

MacGregor had worked on films like Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1961) as well as Leder’s next film, It! , before joining Hammer Films, replacing production designer Bernard Robinson when he passed away. He worked with the studio through the last of their gothic pictures, such as Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969), The Vampire Lovers (1970), Vampire Circus (1972), with Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973) being the last title he worked on. Like most art directors and production designers, they don’t seem to get the credit they richly deserve, especially when it comes to the labs of mad scientists!

Yes, there are going to be some reviews out there that really criticize and dismiss this film as dumb, silly, or just cheesy. No matter what, I still have great fondness for this title and think that it holds up as an effective story, which some chilling moments. This might be the 8-year-old horror fan in me writing this, but if he’s still entertained by it, then so am I.

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If a horror film gives you a palpable sense of discomfort it has certainly done its job, and this film still delivers handsomely. An excellent write-up of a most underrated chiller.

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Netflix’s ‘The Frozen Dead’ Is A Chilling French Thriller With A Killer Twist

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• international crime drama

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Looking to lean in to the bitter cold currently plaguing us? Netflix has the answer with original series  The Frozen Dead , a French-language serial killer thriller set in the French Pyrenees. If you love murder mysteries, film noir, and dark, daring thrillers, prepare to become addicted – because it’s exactly up your alley. Over the series’ six episodes, Detective Martin Servaz (Charles Berling) is sucked back into a case that has haunted him for years thanks to the discovery of a gruesome crime atop a mountain – and what unfolds is totally horrifying (and proves again that European thrillers can keep pace with American series).

Originally titled  Glacé  and translated to  The Frozen Dead , the series kicks off when two men in a cable car in Saint-Martin-de-Comminges, a town in the French Pyrenees, discover a flayed horse erected atop the mountain. It turns out this horse is worth a pretty penny and belonged to a rich guy, so the cops get involved and discover that there might be a lot more to this grisly crime than just equine animosity. It turns out that a certain serial killer may be connected to what becomes a heinous string of crimes, and the ensuing cat-and-mouse game is absolutely riveting.

The cast of characters involved – including Berling’s grizzled Servaz, Julia Piaton’s determined Irene Ziegler, conflicted psychiatrist-with-a-secret Diane Berg, and unhinged killer Julian Alois Hirtmann (Pascal Greggory) – combine to make a stellar ensemble cast, one that perfectly tackles the heavy subject material. They’re aided by a tight script and well-fleshed out characters that are easy to root for and totally despicable in equal measure.

If you think you know what’s coming with every twist and turn, think again –  The Frozen Dead  waits for no one, and throws viewers for a loop with every installment. Whether you’re a casual lover of a serial killer show or looking for your next creepy crime binge, this freaky French series is bound to satisfy your needs. Just make sure you bring a blanket or two before settling in for the evening.

Stream  The Frozen Dead  on Netflix

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the dead don't hurt.

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One of my great great great grandfathers fought for the Union and survived the Battle of Antietam. After his infantry unit was wiped out, he hid under a heap of corpses. As a child, I often found myself thinking about a person doing what he did and then going on to live a normal life, or whatever was classified as normal in the late 1800s. I thought about him again watching Viggo Mortensen's film "The Dead Don't Hurt," a movie that injects the sorts of monumental moments of suffering and violence that you're used to seeing in more traditional, action-oriented Westerns into a tale that is mainly interested in the relationship between a man, a woman, and a child, and the intrigue among various characters who live in the nearest small town. 

Written, directed and scored by Mortensen (in his second venture behind the camera, following the contemporary family drama “ Falling "), and set before and during the US Civil War, “The Dead Don’t Hurt” has standard genre elements, but treats them as a way into something different than the usual. There's a sadistic psychopath who dresses in black, some rich men who lord their power over a Southwestern town, a goodhearted and soft-spoken sheriff, his steely wife, their beautiful, innocent son, and other variations on types that you tend to encounter in movies set during this period of US history. But there are no stagecoach or train robberies, quick-draws at high noon, extended gunfights, dynamite explosions, etc. There is violence of various kinds, and it's presented realistically and unsparingly, but not at such length that the movie seems to be getting off on pain. The pacing is what you would call "slow" if you don't like the movie, "deliberate" if you do.

Mortensen stars as Holger Olsen, a Danish immigrant who ends up as the sheriff of a small town in the American West. He lives in a tiny cabin in a canyon. I won't tell you exactly where the movie begins or ends because it's nonlinear, and accounting for things in the manner of a linear timeline would give a false impression of the movie and spoil important moments. Suffice to say that Holger goes to San Francisco and meets Vivienne Le Coudy ( Vicky Krieps ), a French Canadian flower seller, and takes her back to his cabin, where she overcomes her disappointment at his bare bones lifestyle and tries to build a life for them and the son they will eventually raise together. 

At the same time, the movie keeps returning to the aforementioned town, which is controlled by an arrogant businessman named Alfred Jeffries ( Garret Dillahunt ), his violent, entitled son, Weston ( Solly McLeod ), and the town mayor Rudolph Schiller ( Danny Huston ), who controls most of the local real estate, plus the bank. There’s tension surrounding the ownership of a saloon that's tended by an eloquent barkeep-manager named Alan Kendall (W Earl Brown). A shootout depicted early in the movie passes the saloon into the hands of the Jeffries family. Vivienne ends up working there. Weston takes a fancy to her, and doesn't respond well to being told he can't have her.

I mentioned earlier that this is a nonlinear movie and I’m mentioning it again here just in case you think there’s any standard cause-and-effect dynamic at work. It takes a while to get used to how the story is  told. Mortensen’s script deliberately confounds the way our moviegoing brains are typically asked to function. He starts near the end of his story and moves from the present tense into different parts of the past as needed. Time-shifts are not tied to plot or even theme. They seem as intuitive as brushstrokes in a painting. 

There are also flashbacks to Vivienne’s childhood, wherein she lost her father to war against the English—a trauma that sparks a dream or fantasy about a knight in armor riding through a forest. This image connects to the midsection of the movie, which is where Holger impulsively decides to enlist in the Union army to go off and fight against slavery and earn a promised enlistment payment, leaving Vivienne alone in that tiny house in the canyon. This might strike contemporary viewers as a casually callous thing to do, but it’s the kind of thing that happened plenty back then, and tends to be described in family histories with a sentence like, “Then he went off to fight in the war and came home a year later.” 

The writing and acting of all the characters is intelligent and measured. You get a sense of a complete person who lived a full life offscreen even when you're observing a character who only has a few judiciously chosen moments, such as Brown’s character, who is a bit too pleased with his own eloquence but sometimes seems ashamed after he verbally runs roughshod over others; or a judge played by Ray McKinnon who presides over the trial of a citizen wrongly accused of a horrible crime, and carries on as if God guides his gavel (a pistol butt); or a reverend played by veteran character actor John Getz (of “ Blood Simple ” and “The Fly”) whose community role requires him to oversee an execution whether it's justified or not. (Brown, Dillahunt and McKinnon were all on the HBO Western “Deadwood,” a go-to casting resource for this type of project; it's a treat to see them fully inhabit very different characters from ones they've played in the past.) 

None of the characters unveil themselves as you might expect. Holger initially comes across as a Clint Eastwood-style, strong-silent he-man archetype, but he's less decisive, more sensitive and learned. We often see him reading books or writing in a journal or on parchment. He dotes on Little Vincent ( Atlas Green ), his son with Vivienne, with a sensitivity and physical warmth that’s unusual in male-dominated films like this. His relationship to the Western hero code that’s often summed up as “doing what a man’s gotta do” is complicated as well. Olsen makes a lot of decisions that would result in negative comments on audience preview cards at a focus group screening (hard to imagine Mortensen doing one) because they are, to say the least, not things that a typical Western action hero would do. They’re more like what a real person with a complicated psychology would do—things he might regret in hindsight. 

Krieps, who broke out with “ Phantom Thread ,” is the true star of this movie, even though it’s bracketed by Mortensen’s character riding out on a long journey. She's the only character who gets flashbacks and dreams. She threads the needle of making her character seem self-assured, tough, and self-respecting yet never anachronistically “feminist,” in the contrived, phony way that a lot of period pieces feel obligated to write female characters of earlier times. Though unassuming in how she applies technique, Krieps is a deep and substantive film star, in the tradition of actresses from earlier eras like Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman . She makes a connection with the viewer. You can feel the hope drain from Vivienne when she keeps a stiff upper lip during awful experiences that she has no control over. But you also feel the resolve when she makes the best of a bad situation, and the excitement that blossoms in her when she's treated as a person of value.

Not too many filmmakers have ever made movies like this, and when you do come across one (such as Sam Peckinpah's " The Ballad of Cable Hogue " or the Charlton Heston movie " Will Penny ”, or “Deadwood”, or the 1970s movie " The Emigrants ") it stands out, in part because it avoids the predicable, ritualized high points that the genre is built upon, and instead concentrates on significant moments of interaction between characters who do not have a 20th or 21st century mindset superimposed on them. The lack of pandering to contemporary sensibilities means that all the characters remain slightly at a remove from us throughout the story. It also means that they come across as more real. Yes, certain aspects of the human experience are universal and have never changed. But there is a huge difference across time periods in how individuals understand themselves and each other, and this is a rare movie that respects that.

The movie also has a genuinely cinematic instinct for when to linger on a moment and when to cut around it, or allude to it as something that occurred offscreen. A lot of the longer sequences are just extended interactions between the film’s two romantic leads, who have a pleasing banter but derive a lot of their chemistry from looking at each other with resentment, yearning, gratitude, or disappointment. You almost never get to see material of this sort play out at length in a film set in the American West. Or any kind of film.

Mortensen is 65 now, three years older than Eastwood when he made “ Unforgiven ,” and the entertainment industry is even less hospitable to Westerns now than it was three-plus decades ago, so it’s tough to imagine him making more movies like this one. But he might turn out to be one of the great Western directors if he did. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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The Dead Don't Hurt (2024)

130 minutes

Vicky Krieps as Vivienne Le Coudy

Viggo Mortensen as Holger Olsen

Solly McLeod as Weston Jeffries

Garret Dillahunt as Alfred Jeffries

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‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ Review: A Foursquare Western From Viggo Mortensen

Mortensen gives his film a nested, at times unnecessarily complicated structure, but with performances this good, it’s hard to mind much.

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By Ben Kenigsberg

In making an honest go at reviving the movie western, Viggo Mortensen — who directed, wrote and stars in “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” in addition to composing its score — delivers a few different westerns in one.

Not counting a deathbed prologue, the film initially seems to be staking out a claim in the law-and-order corner of the genre. Mortensen, as a bereaved sheriff named Holger Olsen, appears skeptical when a town dullard stands accused of six murders and apparently claimed not to remember any of them. The local courthouse — a makeshift affair cobbled together in the saloon — is not the most forgiving place for the wrongfully accused, or for anyone. (At one point, in lieu of slamming a gavel to call for order, the judge fires a gun upward twice, then glances toward the ceiling to make sure it won’t cave in.)

We’ve already seen the killer. Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), the entitled and vicious son of the area’s leading rancher, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), is introduced mid-spree: He is first seen emerging from the saloon and casually shooting two people in a single take before the title card appears, dangling above a corpse.

But before “The Dead Don’t Hurt” can become a film about a good sheriff’s efforts to correct a miscarriage of justice, it flashes back to tell the story of another character, Vivienne Le Coudy (played as an adult by Vicky Krieps). A brisker, more classically mounted western might have kept her offscreen, relegating her to the sheriff’s back story.

Painting on a bigger canvas, Mortensen gives his film a nested, at times unnecessarily complicated structure. (Vivienne’s French Canadian childhood gets somewhat superfluous flashbacks of its own.) Once the grown Vivienne meets Olsen — she prefers calling him by his last name — they set out to build a life together. Olsen is an able carpenter; Vivienne has a knack for shooting fowl. She cleans up his dusty, drab parcel of land and inspires him to add some greenery.

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The Dead Don’t Hurt

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Time Out says

The Good, the Bad and the Viggo

Watching this sturdy, sensitively acted Old West drama, it’s easy to wonder how many westerns Viggo Mortensen would have made if he’d been kicking about in the ’50s and ’60s. With his rugged visage and stoical quality, no actor looks more at home on a horse, caked in dust, or chewing over a moral quandary that will inevitably end in someone being punched through a saloon window. The writer-director-star’s shakily titled but very watchable The Dead Don’t Hurt – his fourth western after Young Guns II, Hidalgo and Appaloosa – finds an affecting new way into the genre. Set mainly in the 1860s, it’s a homesteader drama nestled (literally) in a valley beyond which those age-old western staples – corrupt lawmen, vicious blackhats and innocent townsfolk – exert an irresistible and tragic pull.

Mortensen’s Civil War veteran, Holger Olsen, a Danish immigrant roped into becoming sheriff of a small Nevada town, is introduced watching on when an innocent man is sentenced to hang for gunning down some locals. The murderous son of the local cattle man (Brit actor Solly McLeod) is the obvious culprit. Surely Olsen will intervene heroically and stop this miscarriage of justice?

Except, no. Mortensen the screenwriter and director isn’t interested in turning Mortensen the actor into a Randolph Scott, Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper hero. The upstanding but flawed Olsen is a study in believable complexity: a taciturn ex-soldier whose gentle nature can harden into quiet anger like adobe on an outhouse wall. 

No actor looks more at home caked in dust than Viggo Mortensen

In fact, it’s Olsen’s wife, French-Canadian Vivienne, played by the wonderful Vicky Krieps, who’s the real soul of a story, providing it with a strong feminist core. The Phantom Thread star is playful yet steely as this forthright woman whose small triumphs have been hard won, and who has no time for male bravado. Her exchanges with Mortensen’s equally single-minded Dane give the film its best moments. The film’s fiddly structure, which opens close to the end, before catapulting back to the couple’s early courtship on the docks of San Francisco, and then darts around like a disorientated rattlesnake, works against any kind of momentum, though. It’s not a problem while the film is a tender study of a marriage on the frontier , but when it morphs into a more traditional revenge story, there’s a disjointed, half-hearted feel to things. Still, the wider characters, especially Danny Huston’s unctuously dodgy mayor and Garret Dillahunt’s calculating rancher, are nicely drawn and the widescreen locations (with Mexico and Canada standing in for Nevada) are a treat in themselves. And Viggo, well, he was born to ride.    In UK cinemas Jun 7 .  

Cast and crew

• Director: Viggo Mortensen
• Screenwriter: Viggo Mortensen
• Viggo Mortensen
• Vicky Krieps
• Garret Dillahunt
• Solly McLeod
• Danny Huston

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The Dead Don’t Hurt film review — Vicky Krieps shines in Viggo Mortensen’s stark Western

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‘mcveigh’ review: alfie allen impresses in this chilling account of the radicalization of the oklahoma bomber – tribeca festival.

• ‘Brats’ Review: Andrew McCarthy Reexamines The Brat Pack Legacy – Tribeca Festival

By Valerie Complex

Valerie Complex

Associate Editor/Film Writer

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Andrew McCarthy ’s documentary Brats , based on his book Brats: An ’80s Story , offers an intimate exploration of the Brat Pack — a group of young actors who became cultural icons in the 1980s. Through candid interviews and nostalgic reflections, McCarthy delves into the nostalgia of the “Brat Pack” label, coined by journalist David Blum in a 1985 New York magazine article. This term, intended as a playful nod to the Rat Pack of the 1950s and ’60s, had lasting effects on the careers and personal lives of its members. 

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The Brat Pack, composed of actors from iconic films like The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire, became emblematic of 1980s youth culture. However, Blum’s article, which depicted the actors as entitled and bratty, imposed an identity that many of them resented. McCarthy himself admits to struggling with the label, feeling it overshadowed his work and fueled his insecurities that highlight the contrast between public perception and his reality. While fans saw the Brat Pack as a group of close friends living glamorous lives, the actors themselves were uncomfortable with being a part of this group against their will, as they felt it trivialized their talents and constrained their careers. 

The film captures the camaraderie and conflict among the Brat Pack members. Lowe and McCarthy reflect on how the term, despite its negative connotation, ultimately brought most of them closer together (though fellow members Judd Nelson wasn’t available to appear in the film, and Molly Ringwald wasn’t interested in revisiting the past). Thompson and Cryer, who the director called “Brat Pack adjacent,” had different reactions to the label. Thompson wanted to be part of it all and saw the Pack as the cool kids, and Cryer aimed to quickly distance himself from it. 

Brats also touches on the broader context of 1980s teen movies, which were cultural phenomenons that featured frequent crossover among actors, resonated deeply with teenagers and saw box office success. Brats does hint that these films — mostly from John Hughes — targeted middle class white teens, and Hughes’ stories were class-focused. However, the documentary doesn’t delve deep into the topic of race or class, thus missing an opportunity for a richer discussion on how the Brat Pack films and stories affected other communities.

The film’s casual filmmaking style, with scenes shot on iPhones and visible camera crews, adds an authentic, comfortable and conversational tone. The look and feel is rustic and natural, making the audience feel like they’re on a set. McCarthy directs as he narrates, like filming  a series of journal entries. When he comes in contact with his fellow actors, it’s tantamount to group therapy as the release, and catharsis, is palpable for every actor involved.   

The actor-director eventually confronts Blum about the New York article and his intentions. The journalist reflects on his writing, stating that he didn’t anticipate its long-term effects. But he also has no regrets, and equates the experience to a 29-year-old man looking to build a career, and mistakes happen. McCarthy’s skeptical response suggests unresolved feelings about this, but he is finally willing to let it all go. 

Brats is a heartfelt memoir and a reflection on the power of words and perception. It offers a poignant look at the Brat Pack, reminding viewers of the enduring impact of labels and the importance of understanding the people behind the public personas. Title:  Brats Festival:  Tribeca (World Premiere Spotlight) Distributor: Hulu Release date: June 13, 2024 Directors:  Andrew McCarthy Cast: Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Lea Thompson, Jon Cryer Running time:  1 hr 32 min

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‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ Review: Viggo Mortensen Disappears From His Own Western for a Spell, Letting Vicky Krieps Lead

Mortensen's understated and nonlinear second feature privileges the female perspective, pushing back on the violent tropes of studio Westerns like 'Appaloosa.'

By Peter Debruge

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From the second scene of Mortensen’s second feature, “The Dead Don’t Hurt” (following 2020’s excellent father-son drama “Following”), audiences know the fate of Vivienne LeCoudy ( Vicky Krieps ). A resilient French Canadian pioneer woman left alone for years, Vivienne dies at home in bed, a single tear making tracks on her dusty cheek. For no good reason, Mortensen opts to tell her story out of order, flashing back to Vivienne’s childhood (to show the character-defining disappearance of her fur-trapper father) and carrying on past her death to reveal whether her absentee partner (played by Mortensen) manages to avenge what happened to her.

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How many partners have attached themselves to someone else’s dream, then had to adapt when it proves disappointing? Films rarely frame that experience from the woman’s perspective, which makes Mortensen’s enlightened approach fairly refreshing, even if Vivienne’s independence manifests itself in a way that anyone can sense is bad news (and not just because we see a varmint shooting up the saloon and hightailing it out of town early on). Determined to earn her own money, Vivienne applies for a job in that very same saloon, where that very same varmint, Weston (“Tom Jones” star Solly McLeod), lecherously hires her on the spot.

Wearing his entitlement as menacing as his villainous black hat, Weston acts like he owns the bar — as it happens, he does — and everything in it, smashing whom and what he pleases. One night, the young pest shows up drunk at Vivienne’s cabin and forces himself on her (a development that’s predictable to us but comes as a surprise to Krieps’ otherwise intelligent character). After so many subtleties, it’s unfortunate that Mortensen relies on rape as a plot device, though Vivienne’s reaction reinforces the strength she finds in Holger’s absence: defiantly showing up at work the next day, raising the child that results from this violation.

One of the film’s best scenes — emblematic of the way the movie communicates many of its ideas without dialogue — occurs years later, when Holger accepts the boy as his own. When the characters do speak, they express themselves in a clumsy, overwrought way, as if they’ve been watching “Deadwood” and wish to parley as only David Milch can. Danny Huston brings gusto to the role of shady mayor Rudolph Schiller, in cahoots with Weston’s dad, Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt), on a big land deal. Told out of order, those scenes are frustratingly difficult to follow, but also standard enough that we get the gist. (The rest works better on second viewing, once we’ve worked out the chronology.)

In Holger’s absence, Vivienne transforms their scrappy patch of nothing into a proper home, with a thriving garden and plants blooming all around the porch. (She probably should have opened a flower stand in town, rather than find work at the saloon, but then Mortensen couldn’t have made his statement about what dastardly predators men can be.) When Holger returns, it’s to the scene that opened the film, just in time to watch Vivienne kick the bucket. She was the film’s spine, its fiery frontier wildflower, and without her, the movie settles into a kind of melancholy torpor. Weston’s out there somewhere, begging to be taught a lesson, but Mortensen — who, as an actor, expanded the Western in films such as “Jauja” and “The Road” — seems to have other ideas in mind.

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival, Sept. 9, 2023. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 129 MIN.

• Production: (Canada-Mexico-Denmark) A Shout! Studios release of a Talipot Studio presentation, in association with MEP, Perceval Pictures, of a Talipot Studios, Recorded Picture Company, Perceval Pictures production, in association with HanWay Films. Producers: Regina Solorzano, Jeremy Thomas, Viggo Mortensen. Executive producers: Roberto Paxson, Gabriel Terrazas, Ivan Kelava, Daniel Berkerman, Jesper Morthorst, Paula Astorga Riestra, Peter Watson. Co -producers: Gia Galligani, Angela Blair.
• Crew: Director, writer: Viggo Mortensen. Camera: Marcel Zyskind. Editor: Peder Pedersen. Music: Viggo Mortensen.
• With: Vicky Krieps, Viggo Mortensen, Solly McLeod, Garret Dillahunt, Colin Morgan, Ray Mckinnon, W. Earl Brown, Atlas Green, Danny Huston. (English, French, Spanish dialogue)

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