There is some very concerted image-making and mood-making in this technically accomplished yet unsatisfying drama from first-time, Norway-based director Dara Van Dusen. It is a sombre tale of the American old west, adapted by Dusen from the novel by Stewart O’Nan, and somehow has the feel of a short film indulgently taken to feature length. Its visual gestures and set pieces, although striking and often shocking, felt for me disconnected from any emotional truth – a truth that sustained, developed storytelling may have provided.
The setting is a frontier town in Wisconsin in 1870, and Jacob (Johnny Flynn) is both sheriff and pastor – although he wears neither badge nor religious garment. He has seen traumatising service in the civil war, in which he appears to have achieved high rank, although some in the town are suspicious of his Norwegian background. He is married to Marta (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and they have a young child.
When the dead body of an itinerant drifter is discovered on the town’s outskirts, poignantly still in uniform from the war, it is a veritable return of the repressed for a place trying to get over that nightmare. The town’s careworn doctor (John C Reilly) is horrified to realise that this man died of diphtheria (bizarrely, and surely unhygienically, he examines the reeking corpse in his parlour) and a woman from a neighbouring religious community has the same symptoms.
A catastrophic epidemic is imminent and the men are divided as to what to do. Should they declare an unenforceable lockdown-quarantine that would merely trigger a panicky exodus, spreading the disease far and wide? Or begin a secretive policy of non-acknowledgment, which might allow them, by stealth, to keep the illness and public order under control?
But the disease is to render this dilemma irrelevant. Jacob is unable to be tough enough with people and to force them to obey his strictures. There are scenes of horror which are made worse, or at any rate more complicated, by news of a spreading wildfire – a quite separate pestilence, which creates an eerie red glow in the atmosphere. This glow could ambiguously be a PTSD projection, a dramatisation of Jacob’s already deeply unhappy mind. He seems immune to the disease. Is he a carrier? A Typhoid Mary?
Reilly delivers his role with sympathy and weight; Flynn, though always a watchable screen performer, was perhaps not directed as closely as he might have been to create the necessary wrenching anguish. It is a highly controlled artefact of a film, but delivers less than it promises.
