‘A Prayer For The Dying’ review: Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly fight for survival in American West

Dir/scr: Dara Van Dusen. 2026. Norway/Greece/UK/Sweden. 95mins

In a fledgling township in Wisconsin, 1870, an already vulnerable community finds itself under threat from elements beyond its control. New York-born, Oslo-based filmmaker Dara Van Dusen’s atmospheric debut feature A Prayer For The Dying, based on the 1999 novel by Stewart O’Nan, makes the most of its location; a ghost town of sorts in which physical and psychological dangers lurk around every half-built corner. And, despite its period setting, its themes of immigration, disease and environmental catastrophe hum with contemporary relevance. Yet the film’s tone, which holds the viewer at a distance, proves something of a hurdle.

 A potent sense of time and place

Perhaps that’s intentional, as these characters are, effectively, surviving at the far edge of their world, attempting to make something out of nothing. There’s not a lot of room for sentimentality or self-reflection in this hardscrabble environment, which is being civilised through grit, determination and sheer force of will. But it may pose a challenge to the film’s travel beyond the festival circuit following its Berlin Perspectives debut, although the presence of John C. Reilly and Johnny Flynn could well attract arthouse distributors or streamers. Quiver has North American rights.

Flynn is Jacob, a Civil War veteran with Norwegian heritage (which he works to keep under wraps) who does triple duty as the town’s priest, sheriff and undertaker. That’s a heavy enough burden to carry, and Jacob is also wrestling with psychological demons born from his conflict experience. Indeed, the film opens with a nightmarish, luridly-lit vision of blood-red fog, soldiers and horses – horrors that Jacob is obviously trying to bury with dogged religious faith and relentless civic duty. “You don’t know me” is his repeated refrain.

When Jacob is summoned to collect the body of an unknown man, and then discovers a woman wandering delirious in a field, clearly unwell, his tentative grip on the town – and himself – begins to unravel. As the community’s non-nonsense medic Doc (a focused, subdued Reilly) confirms, diphtheria has entered the settlement, and must be contained at all costs. If that wasn’t enough, a raging wildfire poses a further threat.

Jacob has an awful lot to contend with, particularly when the sickness gets too close to home, and Flynn plays him as a man buckling under extreme duress. Snatched moments with his wife Marta (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and infant daughter offer only a brief respite; at all other times his face is set hard, his demeanour taciturn and resigned. We don’t know much about his past, nor about how he or any of these disparate people – including a number of Scandinavian immigrants – ended up in this apparently godforsaken place. It’s clear, though, from the suspicion and often outright contempt in which veteran soldiers like Jacob are held, that, five years after it ended, the Civil War remains a wound which will not heal.

Filming in Slovakia, A Prayer For The Dying has a potent sense of time and place, the ironically-named town of Friendship feeling like an island adrift in a dusty sea, community ties worn to fraying by the inexorable struggle for survival. As leaders of the community, Jacob and Doc have conflicting ideas of how to manage the situation. The God-fearing Jacob believes he has a duty to save everyone while, as a pragmatic man of science, Doc is determined to follow the facts of the situation, even if they lead down a very dark path.

As Jacob begins to question his faith in the face of what could be perceived as divine retribution – plague, pestilence, fire – his psychosis deepens and he becomes something of an unreliable narrator, this Western/thriller hybrid begins to take on the tinges of horror. Claustrophobic, methodical camerawork from Kate McCullough (A Quiet Girl) emphasises the limits of both this town and its people; a muted, muddy colour palette becomes increasingly saturated with pops of red as disease slowly claims the town. Beata Hlavenkova’s well-used score positively pulses with anxiety.

The craft elements are so strong, and tell so much of the story, that there is not a great deal of space left for the emotions of the characters to take hold. And that makes the film’s nightmarish, smoke-saturated climax even more of a curveball, the film abandoning its carefully controlled tone for frenzied melodrama. It’s not enough, however, to entirely derail A Prayer For The Dying, which remains an intriguing period piece and a striking calling card for Van Dusen.