Three years after making his directorial debut with the impressive drama Falling, the multi-talented Viggo Mortensen is back in the director’s chair with this quietly subversive period romance set in the American West. Mortensen also wrote the script, composed the music, and stars as the Danish immigrant Holger, a sheriff in a dusty Nevada town in the mid-19th century. Mortensen’s focused and subdued direction is a well-crafted homage to classic Westerns, updated with the confidence of an auteur to include a female protagonist at the center of the action – the independent free-thinker Vivianne (Vicky Krieps), who finds in Holger both a partner and a kindred spirit striving to live a dignified life in a world of violent primitives.