Viggo Mortensen doesn't just star in this "sinewy, sombre, handsomely crafted" western. He is also its director, its writer and the composer of its score, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "With almost anyone else", the result might be a self-indulgent disaster, but Mortensen has a "self-effacing and even reticent quality" on screen that "works against that danger".
He plays Holger Olsen, a Danish immigrant in 1860s America who lives in a cabin he built himself near a frontier town in Nevada. One day, during a visit to San Francisco, he meets "the frank, unabashed gaze" of Vivienne (Vicky Krieps), a French-Canadian flower seller. The pair become a couple; but when Olsen decides to join the Union army and goes off to fight the civil war, Vivienne is left to fend off the attentions of a predatory local official.
The world the film evokes is one of "cynicism, brutality and bad faith", but the love between Olsen and Vivienne "blooms like a miraculous flower"; and Krieps and Mortensen's "rapport is just right: romantic, besotted with each other, and yet tough and without illusion".
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Krieps (who was so good in 2017's "Phantom Thread") reminds us what a "talented and beguiling actress she is", said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. And even if the way the story shifts back and forth in time is a bit befuddling, this is a strong piece of cinema.
Some may find that the film takes a slow and "circuitous route to get to the killing we know is coming", said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman. But this non-linear plotting enables Mortensen "to put an intriguing female perspective on a traditionally masculine genre", in a film that teases out "a truer sense of the complexities involved in trying to make a go of life on the frontier than we're used to seeing in westerns".
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