As revisionist westerns go, Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt is more contemplative than most. The film has its share of violence, brutality, and injustice, but its protagonists respond stoically to life’s misfortunes, where lust for revenge animates other heroes of the genre. And with a clearly defined focus on the lives of women and immigrants against the backdrop of the Civil War, Mortensen develops thematic material introduced in his directorial debut, 2020’s Falling, which pitted a relentlessly bigoted patriarch against his gay son.

The Dead Don’t Hurt also employs a fragmented timeline like the earlier film. In Falling, frequent flashbacks effectively rendered the confusion of the film’s dementia-suffering father. In The Dead Don’t Hurt, Mortensen has dialed back the aggressive cross-cutting in favor of a more straightforward editorial grammar. But the non-linear construction here serves both to generate dramatic irony and to ensure that the story...