In “A Prayer for the Dying,” the rolling steppes of Slovakia stand in for the plains of 19th-century Wisconsin, but the spiritual setting of director Dara Van Dusen’s relentless Western is a remote outpost in the middle of nowhere. The film ultimately descends into an almost literal hellscape as a small rural community is swiftly and brutally stripped bare by the twin plagues of a diphtheria outbreak and a wildfire outbreak, but Van Dusen’s authoritative control never wavers, even as the chaos ensues on screen. The most anticipated feature of Berlin’s Perspectives First Feature Competition, the film is a brazenly austere debut, anchored by the formidable grit and dedication of Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly.
A native New Yorker now based in Norway, Van Dusen has created a story that perfectly blends rugged American and European arthouse sensibilities, with the burnt flavor of Cormac McCarthy, but it’s actually based on Stewart Ornan’s 1999 historical novel, which seems pretty prescient from a 21st century perspective. It is impossible not to view a public health crisis exacerbated by misinformation and environmental disaster through a post-COVID-19 lens. While that gives this highly authentic historical drama a modern sense of urgency, it may also be a hard sell for audiences uneasy about visions of the end of the pandemic. Either way, this film promises even greater things with a tightly focused writer-director.
The film opens in a hellish space filled with orange mist, showing a dirty, wild-eyed Jacob Hansen (Flynn) pointing a rifle at the blurring, burning world around him. Meanwhile, the camera glides through the fog in the eerie, disembodied nature of a first-person shooter. The title card says 1870, a few years after the end of the Civil War, but is that correct?Everything on screen suggests that the world has met its creator.
Let’s rewind time a little. The sky is clear and the land is no longer on fire, but it is still a dry, flammable golden color. Jacob is a fresher-looking, smarter, and braver Norwegian settler and Civil War veteran living in the new frontier town of Friendship, Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife, Marta (Kristin Kujas Thorp), and their newborn daughter. Because their community is so small, Jacob plays the triple role of sheriff, preacher, and undertaker, and things soon come to an unfortunate conclusion. At least he was spared the job of village doctor. Gutterson (Reilly) is a kindly pragmatist, but he’s equally unprepared for the storm that rolls in.
A diseased woman, writhing, coughing and gnarled, is found in a field on the outskirts of town. Gutterson diagnoses diphtheria as persistent and contagious, but only tells Jacob – together they hope this is an isolated case. But Prayer for the Dying, with its sparse and eerie atmosphere, makes it clear early on that this is a story of unrequited hope. Marta, who is more pessimistic and aggressive than her husband, asks him to leave immediately, but Jacob feels a strict duty of care to the townspeople, even as he protects them from the immediate truth they are facing. Disease will spread. The sky turns red. On the horizon, a woolly shroud of smoke from a distant wildfire appears. We won’t be apart for long.
Van Dusen’s screenplay, lean and concise and driven more by anxiety than by events, contains no surprises or typical tension developments. Especially since the film’s prologue already shows it heading in an apocalyptic direction. But it’s also a nervous, incisive examination of the denial and fatalism that even community leaders tend to succumb to in moments of inevitable danger, an elemental, even Biblical variation on the old horror movie trope of inviting nauseating, helpless resistance from the audience to the characters’ apparently self-destructive decisions.
In his punchiest on-screen showcase since 2017’s Beast, Flynn portrays Jacob’s inner mental breakdown with ever-more excited delivery and increasingly sinuous body language, as his stance shifts from bluffing, tough-guard, and member of the populace to fearless survivalist. Riley, the town’s man of science and reason, an actor who seems fully at home in the world of surrealist Americana following last year’s Heads or Tales, is a stubbornly paternalistic presence, but suddenly, unsuspectingly, he’s gone and a soul-eating delirium takes over.
But it’s the film’s bottom-line contributors, including cinematographer Kate McCullough, who really tighten the screws. Nominated for an ASC Spotlight for her light, sparkling work in Ireland’s Oscar nominee The Quiet Girl, she works here in a much more cramped and claustrophobic register, using Academy proportions, a palette of dead wood gradually stripped of its lush potential, and an effective penchant for whiplash that pops as the going gets tough.
Jan Kochman’s slow, pulsating score pairs perfectly with Gustav Berger and Jesper Miller’s sound design in its sparseness, where the population dwindles and the landscape appears to creak and echo. Similarly, production designer Hubert Pouille’s boxy wooden structures have the feel of a toy town, as if they were built yesterday and could just as quickly be destroyed by vengeful forces of nature. In “Prayer for the Dying,” humans are simply lighting a fire.
