Johnny Flynn and John C Reilly offer casting heft, but this moody, technically sound tale of an unfolding epidemic in 1870s Wisconsin lacks emotional substance
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here 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.
