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What happens when you apply the Dogme 95 aesthetic to the Western? A movie that’s ruthlessly committed to capturing, exploring, and finessing that style from top to bottom. Self-referential moments within genre films have become tiresomely commonplace, but director and co-writer Kristian Levring doesn’t allow for a moment of parody in The Salvation, a pensive revenge tale set in the 1870s American West. The genre-defining John Ford and Sergio Leone drip from every frame and every classic but revisionist sensibility. Grounded by one of Mads Mikkelsen‘s finest performances, The Salvation sets its brutal plot against gold-tinted panoramics and ensures that Mikkelsen’s face is etched in enough blood and grit to make you flinch. Although this entry into the Western canon doesn’t technically explore anything new, Levring brings an outsider’s perspective to the genre’s motifs, making it an unmissable watch for any fan.
What Was the Dogme 95?
Created in 1995, boundary-pushing Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg (later joined by Søren Kragh-Jacobsen and The Salvation’s Kristian Levring) concocted the Dogme 95 movement. Presented with irony but created with legitimate intentions, the Dogme 95 and its Manifesto aimed to preserve the art of independent cinema. The growing popularity of special effects over “pure,” old-fashioned filmmaking had sewn discontent among these directors, who favored an unfiltered portrait of reality. To quote the Manifesto, a set of rules to which the directors swore to adhere, “My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.” Said rules (also called the Vows of Chastity) included restricting camera movement to hand-held, using natural light and 35mm film, and not making genre pictures.
The Salvation is as Western as a Western can get and loves every minute of being so. Its detailed production design and guitar-heavy score break all the Dogme 95 rules. Levring even pays loving attention to the sound of jangling boot spurs. Yet the Manifesto’s heart remains intact, for The Salvation‘s extraction of narrative truth and character nuance is nothing short of ruthless. For Levring, making The Salvation was “a childhood dream come true.”
What Is ‘The Salvation’ About?
The Salvation’s atmosphere instantly transports viewers back to classic Western iconography. A brief montage opens the film: a shot of a blurry sunrise stretching across a flat, dusty landscape. A close-up of horse hooves as they drag a rickety carriage. Bodies clad in 1800s clothing as they maneuver through a cramped train station. A man stands centered in the frame with an orange, dusty frontier stretching out ahead of him complete with visible wind gusts and ominously cloudy skies in the foreground. When the soundtrack’s mournful guitar-plucking starts, it’s heralding a warning: this is a Western, and it isn’t a happy one.
The movie is easily one of the prettiest Westerns in recent memory thanks to cinematographer Jens Schlosser. They milk those widescreen vistas, and the fictional small town of Black Creek evokes the heyday of Monument Valley. Meanwhile, the rural surroundings outside the town speak to the peace of undisturbed nature: tall grass strands rustle in the wind, and mountains etch the distance. Even an evening storm is beautiful, with the rain creating white sparks in the black night.
But little’s as it seems underneath that beautiful exterior. Much like John Ford at his subversive height, The Salvation concerns itself with the struggles of the working class. Jon (Mikkelsen) and his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) are former soldiers who fought in the Second Schleswig War of 1864. The pair immigrated to America and spent seven lonely years in a foreign land building a safe harbor for Jon’s wife Marie (Nanna Øland Fabricius) and their son Kresten (Toke Lars Bjarke). Within hours of the pair’s arrival, two criminals toss Jon from a moving stagecoach and viciously murder Marie and Kresten.
A devastated Jon kills the pair without knowing that the primary assailant, Paul (Michael Raymond-James), is brother to Black Creek’s corrupt land baron Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Delarue demands the townspeople find the man who killed Paul. When local law enforcement fails to deliver Jon within two hours, Delarue murders three residents in cold blood as incentivization.
‘The Salvation’ Reinvents the Classic Western
What follows is a classic revenge tale through an “outsider’s” lens. Much like Sergio Leone interrogated the early Western’s romanticized ideals by prioritizing the gritty and the messy, Levring’s interest is withdrawing humanity’s darkest impulses from each character like poison from a wound. The Salvation has very little shoot-’em-up action. Instead, it’s meditative in the vein of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
For one, Jon is no traditional Western hero or antihero. He’s an immigrant who’s toiled away for seven years in service of the American Dream: move to a prosperous land, make an honest living, and live happily after. Black Creek’s American townspeople are polite whenever Jon comes to town, especially Mayor Keane (Jonathan Pryce), who appears generous to a fault. But Keane’s secretly scamming the townspeople so Delarue can mine the land for oil. And as soon as Delarue threatens Black Creek, its residents turn against Jon. He’s an outsider no matter how faithfully he plays by the rules, a theme best evidenced by Keane casually stealing the boots off Jon’s feet and the town sheriff (Douglas Henshall) arguing that sacrificing Jon to Delarue is worth doing if it protects the town.
The American dream is just a sheen covering up sadism, selfishness, and fear, an emotional triplicate that makes even the kindest-seeming people abandon all pretense of acceptance. And that surface-level politeness conveniently returns once Jon’s disposed of Delarue’s gang. The sheriff acts like Jon’s actions make him Black Creek’s savior, because the foreigner doesn’t deserve personal dignity unless he’s done something beneficial for the Americans.
‘The Salvation’ Meditates on Violence
The Salvation says that war turns men into monsters, and that revenge is a cyclical row of dominos. But Levring’s savvy enough not to glorify violence even for fun. He wants to interrogate the trauma that violence leaves in its wake. Jon’s vengeful slaughter of Paul is akin to a bomb that catches innocent bystanders. Yet it’s Paul’s murder of Marie and Kresten that truly set off the chain reaction. One can argue about the morality of fictional revenge all day long, but Paul would never have faced justice for his vile actions. The Salvation doesn’t condone its protagonist, but he’s also the only one with a moral conscience. And yet, human emotion is complicated. At the same time Jon buries his family, Madelaine (the astounding Eva Green) buries her husband Paul, the unrepentant rapist and murderer. Jon mourns two innocents while Madelaine mourns humanity’s worst.
Eva Green, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Mads Mikkelsen Are Made for Westerns
Conveying these tangled emotions falls upon an acting trio who are nothing short of remarkable. Forget Hannibal Lecter. Jon’s eyes are implacably flinty ice shards. Mikkelsen is a master of micro-acting, and his face and posture say it all: longing, tenderness, or determined fury. And The Salvation’s cinematography certainly makes the most of his glorious face, dirtying those cheekbones and capturing even the slightest, most emotive eye movements. Mikkelsen won Best Actor at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival for The Hunt, and his performance here is an equal tour de force.
One might argue Delarue is Jon’s mirror, and the two characters indeed take diverging paths. But Jon’s true echo is Green’s protagonist Madelaine. Her character’s physically incapable of speech, but Green, like Mikkelsen, doesn’t need a word. Her rage is a searing bonfire to Jon’s arctic cold and directed toward not just the man who killed her husband, but the brother-in-law who wastes no time raping her now that Paul’s out of the way. When Delarue tells Madelaine, an outsider because of her gender, that Paul “never did straighten you out,” Green’s satisfied, vicious smirk is a weapon all its own.
Other actors might scenery-chew their way through a character as openly irredeemable as villain Delarue, but Jeffrey Dean Morgan carries a weight that crushes everyone around him like a black hole. A line of dialogue implies that Delarue was a good, kind man prior to tasting violence. If Jon tried to redeem himself following the war, then Delarue chose corruption. He’s as bad as the oil that catches and drowns the local wildlife. Morgan’s hooded eyes don’t hide any angst or regret. Delarue just is, and that existence causes collateral damage.
Different Cultures Can Make the Best Genre Movies
By the time the credits roll on The Salvation, even the triumphant “ride off into the sunset” ending has been skewered. Jon and Madelaine leave the town together on horseback, but what kind of future awaits them after such suffering? They’re survivors, but Delarue’s oil excavation is still chugging along. What even constitutes salvation in a world like this? The only clear answer is that anyone who loves Westerns should spend two hours with a movie that honors the genre to a worshipful fault, but does so through another culture’s lens.
