A Western Living on a Prayer

Contrary to what a moviegoer might believe, Dara Van Dusen’s debut feature, “A Prayer for the Dying,” is not an exegesis on the Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdowns that were subsequent to it, or the failings of those who implemented them. The movie is based on a 1999 novel by Stewart O’Nan and was in development a good time before the spring of 2020. Contagions and human nature have, of course, long been fodder for fiction: Ask Boccaccio or Albert Camus. Still, any sentient being will draw parallels between recent events and this particular cowboy movie. “A Prayer for The Dying” is heady, grim and, as it reaches the end, tortuous. It’s eclectic in style but elemental in narrative, being a survival story about faith, family, and community. Ms. Van Dusen came across Mr. O’Nan’s book as a 15-year-old, marveling at how “such a simple story [could be] about such big complex things.” Since Ms. Van Dusen’s film is centered on one man faced with circumstances that test an already worn moral compass, John Ford, director of seminal oaters like “Stagecoach” (1939) and “My Darling Clementine” (1946) would have likely agreed.Jacob Hansen (Johnny Flynn) is the sheriff of a dusty Wisconsin burg dubbed, of all things, Friendship. Not only is Jacob responsible for upholding the law, he’s a man of the cloth and the town undertaker. His wife, Marta (the Scandinavian actress Kristine Kujath Thorp), is a winsome young mother, sequestered at the far reaches of town with the couple’s infant daughter. How and why the Hansens made their home at such a distance from the local populace is unknown. We are given some indications that Jacob’s experience as a soldier has left him rattled.Jacob attends to his duties on a bicycle: He has, it seems, a thing about horses. On a bucolic sunny morning spent goofing around with his wife and daughter, Jacob is called away to attend to a body discovered on the outskirts of Friendship: A soldier in a Confederate uniform. As arrangements are made to bring the corpse to town, Jacob spies a woman in the distance acting erratically, a member of a nearby religious sect. She’s brought to the office of Doc, played by John C. Reilly. After examining both the soldier and the woman, he concludes that diphtheria is loose in the land.Doc is wary of setting up a quarantine in the worry that it might prompt civic unrest, but as the illness spreads and bodies accumulate, his hand is forced. If that weren’t enough, news of oncoming wildfires weighs heavily on the local populace. Jacob increasingly finds himself in a befuddlement between faith and duty, settling for decisions that subsequently make a hash of both. All the while, director of photography Kate McCullough renders the proceedings in a wan range of sepias, a tonal palette reminiscent of Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs. As a visual experience, “A Prayer for the Dying” is as flinty as it is sere.Ms. Van Dusen’s screenplay is fraught with Biblical portent, taking off from Mr. O’Nan’s riffing on the Book of Job. The narrative here is incessant; the rhythm of its events is gradual if, at moments, interrupted by anomalous bursts of speed and sound. The visual effects by Antonis Kotzias favor metaphor over verisimilitude, but Beata Hlavenková’s overweening score and an oh-so-portentous voiceover put an arthouse damper on an otherwise solid addendum to the western genre.

A Western Living on a Prayer

A Western Living on a Prayer

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