The movie I didn't understand

Spoilers for The Dead Don't Hurt.

I had a very odd experience this week, one I'm not sure I've ever had before. 

It's not that I've never misunderstood a movie. But usually a movie I don't understand is existing on some sort of abstract intellectual plane, or I lost my bearings early on and never got them back, or it's just plain muddled in its execution. I've never misunderstood a movie quite like this. 

I received a screener of The Dead Don't Hurt, the new western from Viggo Mortensen, in time to review it for its December 5th Australian release. In fact, I received it plenty early, watching it this past Wednesday and finishing the review by Friday morning.

It was a bit of a middling review. I certainly liked aspects of the film, while overall feeling underwhelmed by it. That's often a 6/10 for me, and that was the case here. 

I considered including my whole review here, but that's a lot of reading, and I'm not actually sure yet whether I will post this review. I have a few days to decide whether I will rewrite it or just include an author's note, because having gotten the screener obliges me to post something about the movie. 

I don't need to include the whole thing, though, to give you a gist of the feeling I had while watching the movie. One line in the review summarizes the disconnect pretty well: 

"The focus of the script from moment to moment feels a bit arbitrary, the eventual resolutions to various plot threads as flat as they are sudden."

These are the words of a person who detected something about this narrative that was off, but could not put his finger on what it was.

There was one thing I wanted to fact check about my review -- namely, the correct way to describe the character played by Garret Dillahunt -- and so I went to read its plot synopsis on Wikipedia, as I am wont to do. Here are where the spoilers come in, but they're only about the structure of the film, not its content. I really only need to give you the portion on Wikipedia that is relevant to what I didn't get about the movie:

"The film's plot is presented as two sequences of events interweaving each other in a nonlinear narrative. The following is a linear summary of the plot." 

Um, what?

When I was watching this movie, I had no idea the events were being played out of sequence. 

In fact, what I thought were two different sets of characters -- a woman and a young boy -- were actually the same characters, only seen at different times in the story. 

I'm not just an idiot, believe me. And here I have to give you some more spoilers to explain myself.

At the very start of the movie -- as in, the film's very first shot -- a woman dies in bed. She's seen very much in close-up, so it's not possible to get a full sense of who she is, or even which actress is playing this woman. Because I surely would have recognized Vicky Krieps under ordinary circumstances, wouldn't I?

But I did not, and so when Krieps shows up again, maybe 15 minutes later, I figured that this was a new woman, not the wife of our main character (played by Mortensen himself) who died earlier. Again, remember, I have no idea these events are being told out of sequence. 

Then there's a child, who I believed to be Mortensen's child from his marriage to this woman who died. Various events occur in the plot (I don't need to get into them) and another child materializes later as the son of Krieps' character, first a young child and then growing older. It's the same child, but I did not know that. (And also explains why there are scenes where this child isn't present.)

What I don't understand is, was it Mortensen's intention to make it unclear that these events were being shown out of sequence, or was it just poor craft?

And that's really my greatest argument for printing my review as it is, maybe only with an author's note to contextualize it for people who might think I'm an idiot. If I, a person who has seen more than 6,500 movies of all sorts of experimental narrative chronologies, did not realize that was going on here, is that my problem, or the film's?

I didn't think I had any reason to go back and review earlier footage in the movie, and I didn't think that some superficial similarities of these characters -- one of whom I only saw on screen in close-up for one minute -- was sufficient reason to believe they were the same character. I think if you are going to do something like this, you sort of have to hit us over the head with it -- at least eventually. There has to be an "a-ha" moment.

The thing that does make me think I might just have been dumb, though, is that there are locations listed on the screen at times, and years. So if I went back and watched the movie again, I might find that the years actually state very matter-of-factly that events are being shown out of sequence. But that required me to remember that one year said 1861 and the other said 1863, or whatever, and specifically care about that in the moment. When the events occur "a long time ago," whether it was 1861 or 1863 often doesn't matter to us. 

So now the thing I am asking myself is: Do I need to watch this movie again before Thursday? The screener link won't have expired yet. Do I need to come at it with fresh eyes, knowing what I now know?

At this time of year, time is precious and there are a lot of movies I need to see. I usually only watch a select few current year movies a second time, and usually only if I love them. There's only one 2024 movie I've seen more than once, for example, and I can't say I have any plans to rewatch any others before the end of January.

So it'll likely come down to how my Monday and Tuesday night go, and whether I think I have the time for this -- or if the author's note will suffice.

It may actually come down to my impression of how stupid not having detected the non-linear narrative structure will make me seem. If I watch it again and it was clear as day, well, maybe I need to re-write the review. But if it strikes me as equally obscure, maybe I'm okay with what I already wrote. And then I have to consider that if I had never gone to Wikipedia, I would have just published my review, none the wiser. If that were the case, there would not even be the author's note. 

Either way, it's a second reckoning with The Dead Don't Hurt -- even if only just in my head as I weigh out these options, and a I write this post.