A new Swedish, British, Greek, Norwegian co-production “A Prayer for the Dying”

“A Prayer for the Dying” Review: Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly Anchor an Impressively Severe End-of-Days Western

The frontier resilience of a small Wisconsin settler town is steadily overpowered by a deadly epidemic in Dara Van Dusen's tough, taut debut.

Variety

By Guy Lodge

February 13, 2026

The rolling grasslands of Slovakia stand in for the plains of 19th-century Wisconsin in “A Prayer for the Dying,” though the spiritual setting of Dara Van Dusen‘s unforgiving western lies in some remote outpost between anywhere and nowhere. As a small rural settlement is swiftly and ruthlessly stripped bare by the twin plagues of a diphtheria epidemic and spreading wildfires, the film eventually descends into a near-literal hellscape, though even when pandemonium takes over on screen, Van Dusen’s formal control never wavers. The starriest prospect in Berlin’s Perspectives competition for first features, it’s an imposing, ascetic debut, braced by performances of formidable grit and commitment from Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly.

A native New Yorker now based in Norway, Van Dusen duly brings a blend of ruggedly American and Euro-arthouse sensibilities to a story with a burnt whiff of Cormac McCarthy to it — though it’s in fact adapted from a 1999 work of historical fiction by Stewart O’Nan that looks rather prescient from a 21st-century vantage point. It’s hard not to view this parable of a public health crisis exacerbated by misinformation and environmental disaster through a post-COVID lens. That lends contemporary urgency to a starkly authentic period piece, while also making it a potentially hard sell to audiences leery of end-of-days pandemic visions. Either way, it promises yet bigger things from its sternly focused writer-director.

It begins in an infernal blanket of orange haze, introducing grimy, wild-eyed Jacob Hansen (Flynn) as he points a rifle at the blurry, burning world around him — while the camera glides through the haze with the eerie, disembodied quality of a first-person shooter game. A title card specifies the year as 1870, a few years after the end of the Civil War, but can that be right? Everything on screen suggests the world has met its maker.

We rewind a short time. The skies clear, the land no longer ablaze but still a dry, flammable golden. Jacob, fresher-faced and better kempt, is an intrepid Norwegian settler and Civil War veteran in the new frontier town of Friendship, Wisconsin, where he lives with his wife Marta (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and their newborn daughter. Theirs is a community so small that Jacob does triple duty as its sheriff, preacher and undertaker, roles that circumstances will shortly consolidate in unhappy fashion. He’s spared the job of village doctor, at least: That goes to Guterson (Reilly), a kindly pragmatist equally unprepared for the gathering storm.

An agonized woman, writhing and coughing and gnarled by disease, is found in a field on the edge of town. Guterson diagnoses diphtheria, relentless and contagious, but tells only Jacob — together, they hope it’s an isolated case. But “A Prayer for the Dying” announces itself early, with its sparse, baleful atmospherics, as a tale where hope goes unrewarded. Though Marta, more pessimistic and proactive than her husband, asks that they leave straight away, Jacob feels a grim duty of care to the townspeople, even as he shields them from the direct truth of what they are facing. The disease spreads. The sky reddens. On the horizon appears a woolly shroud of smoke from a distant wildfire. It doesn’t stay distant for long.

Lean and terse and driven more by anxiety than incident, Van Dusen’s script doesn’t go in for surprises or conventionally developing tension, not least since the film’s prologue has already shown us where it’s all apocalyptically headed. But it’s a nervy, perceptive examination of the denial and fatalism toward which even community leaders can be inclined at moments of inescapable peril — an elemental, even Biblical, variation of the old horror-film trope that invites the audience’s queasy, helpless resistance to a character’s most patently self-destructive decisions.

In his punchiest big-screen showcase since 2017’s “Beast,” Flynn maps Jacob’s interior spiritual collapse with ever more agitated delivery and progressively winded body language, his stance shifting from that of a bluff, rugged protector and man of the people to darting, desperate survivalist. As the town’s man of science and reason, Reilly — an actor who, following last year’s “Heads or Tails?,” looks and sounds entirely at home in the realm of surreal period Americana — is a sturdily paternalistic presence until, suddenly and vulnerably, he isn’t anymore, and a soul-sinking derangement takes over.

But it’s the film’s below-the-line contributors who really tighten the screws, beginning with DP Kate McCullough. An ASC Spotlight nominee for her airy, radiant work on Irish Oscar nominee “The Quiet Girl,” she works here in a far more cramped, claustrophobic register, using Academy ratio, a deadwood palette gradually stripped of any verdant possibility, and an effective tendency toward jumpy whip-pans as the situation worsens.

Jan Kocman’s slow-pulsing score coordinates perfectly with Gustaf Berger and Jesper Miller’s sound design in its sparseness, the landscape seeming to creak and echo as it depopulates. Likewise, production designer Hubert Pouille’s boxy, timber-built structures aptly have a toy-town quality to them, as if they went up just yesterday, and can be destroyed just as fast by vengeful natural forces. In “A Prayer for the Dying,” man is mere kindling.

 A Prayer for the Dying – International title

 

A 2024 Swedish, British, Greek, Norwegian co-production [Film i Väst, Garagefilm

     International, Tom Wilhelmsens Stiftelse (Stockholm), Anton, The Bureau (London),

     Asterisk, Yafka Studio (Athens), Eye Eye Pictures, Oslo Pictures, Albert Verlinde

     Producties, Talent Norge (Oslo),

Producers: John Baker, Harald Fagerheim Bugge, Charles Dorfman, Jan Kallista, Tom

     Kjeseth, Ketil Lømsland, Marcin Luczaj, Jan Naszewski, Andrea Berentsen Ottmar,

     Sébastien Raybaud, Magnus Thomassen, Marlon Vogelgesang, Dyveke Bjørkly

     Graver, Pavel Bercík, Kristina Börjeson, Fenia Cossovitsa, Jana Garajova, Tristan

     Goligher, Vicky Miha, Mimmi Spång, Zahra Waldeck

Director: Dara Van Dusen

Story: A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan

Screenplay: Dara Van Dusen

Cinematographey: Kate McCullough [color]

Music: Beata Hlavenkova

Running time: 95 minutes

 

Cast:

Jacob Hansen – Johnny Flynn

Doc – John C. Reilly

Marta Hansen - Kristine Kujath Thorp

Harlow - Gustav Lindh

Chase - Hilton Pelser

Fenton - Andrew Whipp

Ol Meyer - Daniel Weyman

Bart - David Ganly

John Henry - Peter Adame

Sarah Ramsay - Radka Caldová

Marcus & Thaddeus - Tobias John Coulton-Shaw

Lydia - Dagmar Edwards

Train engineer – Eduard Horvath

Fred Lembeck - Juraj Hrcka

Cyril - Christopher John-Slater

Sylvester - Tadhg Murphy

Bitsi - Nienna Robinsonová

Emil - Christopher Rygh

Singing woman - Monika Stolcova

Amelia - Charlotte Vorobjov

Chase's woman/village girl – Vanessa Weisz

Millard - Leonard Winkler

Dead soldier - Viktor Zorňan

Stunt coordinator - Roman Jankovic

Stunts: Marián Chmelár, Martin Csiaki, Sona Havranova, Milan Hrvol, Denisa Juhos, Matus Lajcak, Stano Satko (Stanislav Satko), Miroslava Slezáková, Michal Vesely

Trailer link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj_kkJFm4AQ