Felt to be old-fashioned, racist, and unbankable, Westerns fell out of favor in Hollywood for many years. Fortunately for those who’ve carried the torch and kept their My Darling Clementine Blu-rays clutched tight, the tide of taste seems to be turning. The biggest cause, or bellwether, is probably the popular TV melodrama Yellowstone — dubbed “Succession for red states,” though it has far greater viewership. Its creator, Taylor Sheridan, also wrote or directed the “neo-Western” films Sicario (2015), Hell or High Water (2016), and Wind River (2017). To top everything, Yellowstone’s lead, Kevin Costner, left to direct a four-part Western passion project, Horizon: An American Saga, whose first film “chapter” debuts later this month. (Skeptics predict the project will be a flop of Heaven’s Gate proportions; we’ll see.)

But the larger story of the return of the Western also has an odd tributary that runs, for whatever reason, through Denmark. Funny that the Danes, inhabitants of a watery Scandinavian country, should have such an affinity. After starring in 2014’s absurdist Patagonian Western Jauja, Viggo Mortensen, most famous for portraying Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings films, has now written, directed, produced, and co-starred in his own contribution to the Western genre, The Dead Don’t Hurt, about a Danish immigrant in frontier America whose decision to enlist in the Civil War has grave implications for his French Canadian wife, played by Vicky Krieps. Mortensen, born in New York, is Danish American, and the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen has starred in 2014’s The Salvation, about a Danish immigrant to 1800s America who takes revenge on outlaws who kill his family, and last year’s The Promised Land, a quasi-Western transported to the Danish moorlands.