A Prayer for the Dying Is in Theaters Now — Flynn and Reilly Carry a Bleak 1870s Western

LOS ANGELES — The most unsettling western of the year just walked into American theaters. A Prayer for the Dying, the feature debut of writer-director Dara Van Dusen, opens nationwide today, October 9, via Quiver Distribution — eight months after it turned heads in the Berlinale's Perspectives competition for first features.

This is not the kind of western that opens with a gunfight. It opens with orange haze. The film is set in July 1870 in Friendship, Wisconsin, where Jacob Hansen (Johnny Flynn), a Civil War hero, is simultaneously the town's sheriff, its pastor, and its undertaker. When a diphtheria epidemic sweeps the settlement and wildfires creep in from the treeline, Jacob becomes the thin line between a community and total collapse — while his wife Martha, played by Norwegian actress Kristine Kujath Thorp, and their toddler daughter Amelia wait at home for a world that may not survive the month.

Flynn, known to American audiences from Emma and The Outfit, carries nearly every frame — and the festival reviews suggest he carries it well. John C. Reilly plays the town doctor, the one voice of reason Jacob can lean on as the townsfolk's fear curdles into something more dangerous. It's a quieter register than Reilly's recent work — no broad comedy, no scene-stealing theatrics, just a doctor watching his town die in real time.

The source material is Stewart O'Nan's 1999 novel of the same name, a work of historical fiction that has only grown more unsettling with age. Van Dusen, a New York native now based in Oslo, has spoken of the film as a parable of a public-health crisis made worse by misinformation and environmental disaster — a 19th-century story with an unavoidably post-COVID shadow. Variety's Guy Lodge wrote from Berlin that it was an "imposing, ascetic debut," with a burnt whiff of Cormac McCarthy, braced by performances of what he called "formidable grit and commitment" from Flynn and Reilly.

Not everyone at the festival was converted. Time Out awarded it 4 out of 5, singling out Flynn's tormented sheriff and Reilly's dependably unfussy work. But the Radio Times found it "inventive, try-hard" and largely soporific at 2 out of 5, and RogerEbert.com's Brian Tallerico landed at 2.5 out of 4, admiring the craft while noting the film's dust-brown bleakness is hard to sit with. The divide is real — and honestly, it's the kind of split that makes a film worth seeing for yourself.

Behind the camera, the details are as considered as the premise. The film was shot in the Slovakian countryside doubling for the plains of 19th-century Wisconsin. Cinematographer Kate McCulloch built a visual language out of unnerving camera pivots — 90-degree turns and push-ins that refuse the comfort of seamless cutting, so the unease feels mechanical and inescapable. The costumes are filthy in the way real frontier clothes were filthy, and Jacob, in a detail critics loved, rides a bicycle instead of a horse. The whole thing runs a tight 95 minutes.

The production itself is a European co-production — Swedish, British, Greek, and Norwegian money behind an American story, produced by Eye Eye Pictures — which explains how a film this formally severe got made at all. Quiver Distribution picked it up for North America, and it lands in a crowded October corridor: it opens the same weekend as Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning and Rob Savage's Jessica Chastain horror pic Other Mommy, both of which are reviewed in this weekend's what-to-watch guide.

The October 9 corridor is genuinely crowded. The same 25th Frame preview lists Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning, Rob Savage's Other Mommy, Bassam Tariq's Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (Mahershala Ali and John Cho), Cristian Mungiu's Fjord (Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve), Renny Harlin's The Beast (Samuel L. Jackson and Joel Kinnaman), and James McAvoy's directorial debut California Schemin' all opening alongside it. In that company, a severe 95-minute arthouse western is the outlier — which is exactly why the Berlinale crowd remembered it.

Fair warning from nearly every review out of Berlin: this is not comfort viewing. It's a film about quarantine decisions, misinformation, and a man watching his faith and his town erode at the same time. If that sounds like a hard sell on a Friday night, it is. But it's also the kind of debut that announces a director — and Variety wrote that it "promises yet bigger things from its sternly focused writer-director," the kind of sentence festival critics don't hand out casually.