At The Movies: Deep performances anchor The Dead Don’t Hurt, Fancy Dance

The Dead Don’t Hurt (NC16)

130 minutes, opens on June 27
4 stars

The story: Viggo Mortensen is much more than Aragorn of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy (2001 to 2003). The Hollywood multi-hyphenate produces, directs, writes, composes the plaintive score and co-stars opposite Vicky Krieps as her lover in the 1860s American West during the Civil War.

It is instant attraction when Mortensen’s Danish carpenter Holger Olsen and Krieps’ Franco-Canadian florist Vivienne Le Coudy, two rugged individualists, lock eyes in San Francisco. They begin a life together back in his shack in Nevada Territory.

The magnificent mountainous region is, in fact, Durango, Mexico, which previously hosted John Wayne classics and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). Mortensen loves his westerns: His filming location is deliberate. All the same, The Dead Don’t Hurt subtly upends this most American and masculine of cinema traditions for a tender yet unsentimental romance of the pioneer immigrants’ survival.

The dialogue is a polyglot of English, Spanish, Danish and French.

The nonlinear narrative is unnecessarily confusing, but such is Mortensen’s confidence in his storytelling.

Most radically, it chooses to stay with the woman after Holger enlists in the Union Army. The couple’s idyll is short-lived. Vivienne is left alone on the untamed territory to fend off the sexual predations of a land baron’s (Garret Dillahunt) brutish son (Solly McLeod). And the glorious Luxembourgian actress Krieps from Phantom Thread (2017) and Corsage (2022) entrances in her portrayal of the heroine’s stubborn grit and passionate indomitable spirit.

She shores up the movie until Holger’s belated return to reckon with revenge and forgiveness. Violence – on the battlefront but also the homestead – has by then forever changed them both.

Hot take: A pair of deep performances is not the only reason for recommending the sensitive frontier adventure.

Fancy Dance (NC16)

117 minutes, premiering on Apple TV+ on June 28
3 stars

The story: In her first starring role since her Academy Award-nominated breakout in Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023), Lily Gladstone is Jax, a hustler in her 30s scraping by on the Seneca-Cayuga Nation Reservation in the United States’ Oklahoma, while searching for her missing sister.

Indigenous women across the US and Canada are murdered at a rate of 10 times the national average.

Jax’s sister in Fancy Dance is just another human rights statistic. She is a woman of colour working as a stripper, her life of no value except to Jax and her teenage daughter Roki (newcomer Isabel Deroy-Olson).

Instead of investigating the disappearance, the authorities undertake to remove Roki from Jax’s care into the suburban home of her white grandfather (Shea Whigham).

The girl feels displaced. Plus, she really wants to dance in the state’s upcoming intertribal powwow.

And she will, as Jax breaks her out of custody and goes on the run with her to get her there. Gladstone’s is a fierce performance despite how unlikeable the character can be – she deals drugs and coaches Roki in theft.

But petty crime is their means of survival.

Director Erica Tremblay’s assured feature debut is equal parts outlaw road trip, family drama and homicide mystery, which coalesce into a picture of a community failed by the system and blighted by poverty and cultural erasure. The powwow is all they have left of themselves.

Tremblay is Seneca-Cayuga, and star-cum-executive producer Gladstone is of Blackfeet descent. The movie has the lived-in authenticity of their experiences, as well as sorrow and simmering fury.

Hot take: Native Americans have been marginalised in movies too, their stories seldom told. This credible effort marries the personal and the political in highlighting their injustices.