THE STORY – In 1870, the town of Friendship, Wisconsin, is enduring a dry, hot summer. The small town revolves around Jacob Hansen (Johnny Flynn), a hero of the American Civil War who, in spite of his many accomplishments, is unable to cast off the violence and darkness of his past as a soldier. Feeling compelled to atone for the wrongs he has committed, Jacob takes on the responsibility not only of providing for his young family but also of serving as sheriff, undertaker, and pastor for Friendship. He thus considers Friendship to be under his protection – a claim that comes to haunt him when an epidemic hits the town that the town’s doctor (John C. Reilly) cannot contain. As every decision becomes a choice between two evils, Jacob is increasingly haunted by his war-ridden past. It is unclear how much longer he can continue in his self-imposed role as the town’s protector or whether he will ever be able to forgive himself for what he has done.
THE CAST – Johnny Flynn, John C. Reilly, Kristine Kujath Thorp & Gustav Lindh
THE TEAM – Dara Van Dusen (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 95 Minutes
It begins with a dead dog rotting in the road. No dialogue, no context, just heat, flies, and the heavy stillness of decay. It is a striking image, one that promises spiritual and moral rot on every level. For a brief moment, “A Prayer for the Dying” seems poised to become something bracing: a plague-ridden Western about faith buckling under catastrophe. Instead, Dara Van Dusen’s debut turns into a misfire in every sense. Wisconsin burns onscreen in quarantine pyres and wildfire, but the film itself goes up in flames under the weight of its own aesthetic excess. It is so intoxicated by its visual ambition that the story is left smoldering in the background.
Set in 1870 during a suffocating drought, the film follows Civil War veteran Jacob Hansen (Johnny Flynn), who has appointed himself sheriff, undertaker, pastor, and the moral guardian of the town of Friendship in Wisconsin. When a diphtheria outbreak descends on the land, Jacob’s conviction in his own righteous stewardship begins to fracture. The local doctor (John C. Reilly), a man of science, pushes for strict quarantine and rational response. Jacob leans into faith, fate, and a martyr’s sense of duty disguised as leadership. The thematic terrain is rich: a traumatized soldier haunted by violence now tasked with saving lives, a community split between reason and belief. Van Dusen has described the film as “biblical” and “surreal,” and there are moments when that ambition nearly coheres. Cinematographer Kate McCullough crafts images of beauty. The land appears scorched into abstraction, colors drained until everything feels dust-choked and sun-bleached. Pyres glow like portals to hell. Smoke hangs over the town like a final breath. Handheld shots follow Jacob hauling bodies through mud with near hallucinatory urgency. The technical control is undeniable.
The editing blurs the scenes together in feverish rhythms. At its best, the film resembles a Sergio Leone western refracted through horror or Oz Perkins staging pestilence on the frontier. Van Dusen’s elevated “faith camera,” meant to evoke divine oversight, reinforces the film’s symbolic ambitions. Yet this visual bravura ultimately becomes its undoing. The movie is so carefully composed, with every bloodstain and splintered plank arranged with aesthetic precision, that it begins to resemble a showroom of despair. What is missing is its emotional architecture. The ideological clash between Jacob and the doctor should ignite the narrative: faith versus science, authority versus restraint. Instead, their exchanges never rise above tidy debate. Reilly, usually the grounding force even in the strangest material, is sidelined. His doctor becomes a vessel for rational arguments that sound drafted rather than lived. Their disagreements circle the same ground without escalating. For a film that foregrounds “friendship” as a thematic pillar, the bond between these men feels thin, making it less a friendship than a working relationship strained by crisis. As the epidemic worsens, the audience is told the stakes are personal and profound, but the screenplay never lays the groundwork to make that weight felt.
Johnny Flynn is left to shoulder nearly the entire dramatic burden, and the strain shows. Jacob is conceived as a man unraveling under the trauma of the Civil War and the crushing responsibility placed upon him. Yet the script mistakes brooding opacity for depth. A persistent, sermon-like voiceover drones on about faith, guilt, and moral ambiguity, aiming for spiritual gravity but landing closer to self-important abstraction. Jacob questions God, himself, and his town, yet none of these inquiries lead to revelation or transformation. The more the film insists on his torment, the less tangible it becomes. Meanwhile, the diphtheria outbreak, which should serve as both narrative engine and thematic crucible, recedes into the atmosphere. It becomes a gruesome texture rather than a dramatic catalyst. Babies cough up blood. Corpses pile up. Ash blankets the town like a permanent shroud. The horror is vivid and sometimes shocking, but without modulation, it curdles into numbness. Misery without variation stops being devastating and starts being exhausting.
Above all, there is no denying the craftsmanship. The Slovakia-built town feels fully inhabited, every charred beam and cracked floorboard steeped in tactile authenticity. Costumes and production design immerse the viewer in a convincingly decaying world. Beneath the grime and smoke, however, the narrative remains oddly thin. The film borrows from Western iconography, Leone’s isolation, Tarantino’s simmering brutality, and Miller’s apocalyptic chaos, yet lacks their structural rigor or emotional propulsion. It gestures toward myth without earning mythic weight.
The final act pushes into full-blown phantasmagoria as Jacob’s psyche fractures and reality distorts around him. Fires swell toward apocalyptic spectacle, and the suggestion of unreliable narration casts doubt on everything that has been seen. It is a bold turn that might have elevated the suffering into something metaphysical. Instead, it feels inflated. By the time hallucination overtakes coherence, the audience’s emotional reserves are already depleted. The climax does not devastate; it confirms a suspicion long forming: the film confuses severity with substance.
There are flickers of promise. A handful of horror-tinged sequences generate genuine tension, and the atmosphere never wavers in its conviction. The lean runtime prevents the project from collapsing entirely. Ambition, however, is not execution. The themes of ego, belief, and moral collapse hover at the margins without ever crystallizing into a sense of dramatic inevitability. What remains is a hyper-stylized Western that looks extraordinary and feels hollow, a beautifully composed spectacle that burns brightly for a moment before fading almost immediately from memory.
