Prayer for Death Review – The Pandemic West Feels Like a Short Stretch Over a Long Time | Berlin Film Festival 2026

THere’s some highly orchestrated image-making and mood-making in this technically accomplished but unsatisfying drama from first-time Norway resident Dara van Dusen. It’s a bleak tale of the American Old West, adapted by Dawson from Stuart O’Nan’s novel, and somehow feels like a short film shot at length. His visual gestures and set pieces, while striking and often shocking, felt to me disconnected from any emotional truth – a truth perhaps provided by the ongoing, evolving storytelling.

The film is set in a Wisconsin frontier town in 1870, and Jacob (Johnny Flynn) is a sheriff and a priest — though he doesn’t wear a badge or religious clothing. He saw traumatic service in the Civil War, where he appears to have reached high rank, although some in the city question his Norwegian background. He is married to Marta (Kristin Kujath Thorpe) and they have a young child.

When the body of a wanderer is discovered on the outskirts of the city, still wearing his military uniform from the war, it represents a real return for the oppressed to a place trying to overcome this nightmare. The concerned town doctor (John C. Reilly) is horrified when he realizes that this man died of diphtheria (grotesquely and decidedly unsanitary, examining the foul-smelling corpse in his parlor) and that a woman from a nearby religious sect is suffering from the same symptoms.

A catastrophic epidemic is imminent and the men are divided over what to do. Should they declare an unenforceable quarantine that would only lead to a panicked exodus, spreading the disease widely? Or initiate a covert policy of non-recognition, which might allow them, surreptitiously, to keep the disease and public order under control?

But the disease is making this dilemma irrelevant. Jacob is unable to be strict enough with people and force them to obey his restrictions. There are scenes of horror made worse, or in any case more complex, by news of spreading wildfires – an entirely separate epidemic, which creates a strange red glow in the atmosphere. This glow could vaguely be a projection of PTSD, a dramatization of Jacob’s already very unhappy mind. He appears to be immune to the disease. Is it the carrier? Typhoid Mary?

Reilly delivers his role with empathy and gravitas. Flynn, despite being an always watchable screen performer, may not have been directed as much as he could have created the necessary agonizing pain. It’s a highly controlled artifact of the film, but it delivers less than it promises.