One of the founding “brethren” of Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95, Danish director Kristian Levring made the movement’s most underrated early exercise, the sweatily intense The King Is Alive. Now he offers a straight genre number, a western starring Mads Mikkelsen as a Danish immigrant whose wife and son have barely arrived to join him before he has cause to embark on a revenge mission. Levring’s film tips its Stetson to John Ford and Sergio Leone with bold widescreen visuals – daytime shots in which even the sun looks sunbaked, prairie nightscapes resembling ink-soaked denim. But it never transcends reverent pastiche, down to the hackneyed twang of Morricone-style guitars.
Levring clearly digs taciturnity: Eric Cantona has perhaps two lines and otherwise just looms; Eva Green’s character is mute, but shoots a glare that could shrivel cacti at 50 paces; and the dependably tight-lipped Mikkelsen makes Gary Cooper look like a frightful old chatterbox. Best reason to see The Salvation: its chief varmint, played with ornery glint and bristling whiskers by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who has the sleepy-eyed malignity of vintage western heavy Jack Elam.
