I probably need to stop choosing films simply based on their casts, because that strategy doesn’t seem to be working out particularly well for me. Earlier this year, I reviewed a film solely because Willem Dafoe was in it. It didn’t have audio description, and it wasn’t very good. I stand by that assessment, and I honestly don’t think adding audio description would have saved it. Now I’ve found myself watching A Prayer for the Dying, another film without audio description, this time featuring Academy Award nominee John C. Reilly, an actor I’d love to see doing more interesting work, alongside the increasingly impressive Johnny Flynn. It’s a Civil War-era drama set in Minnesota but filmed in Eastern Europe, which might actually be the most interesting thing I can say about it. Apparently, shooting a period piece in America has become so prohibitively expensive that, in order to recreate Civil War-era Minnesota, the filmmakers had to travel to another continent. They couldn’t just find a forest in Minnesota. They had to go to Europe to reconstruct one. Which also explains why, outside of the recognizable names, much of the supporting cast consists of European actors. Cost cutting. Budgetary constraints. Welcome to modern independent filmmaking.

Flynn plays Jacob Hansen, a Civil War veteran who has become something of a jack-of-all-trades in his small Wisconsin community. He’s the sheriff, the undertaker, and generally the person everyone turns to when something needs to be done. He’s essentially the entire municipal government rolled into one person. Unfortunately, when a diphtheria outbreak threatens the town, being the man who wears every hat suddenly becomes an enormous responsibility. Panic begins to spread, his past starts catching up with him, and the arrival of John C. Reilly’s character only complicates matters further. Loyalties are tested, people begin fearing for their lives, and the community starts coming apart as everyone wonders who might be next. Where’s Balto when you need him?

Flynn delivers another strong performance, adding yet another feather to his increasingly impressive cap. Unfortunately, some of the characters surrounding him feel moderately underdeveloped, including members of his own family. Part of the problem is that A Prayer for the Dying isn’t particularly dialogue-driven. It’s a film built around atmosphere, mood, and themes, which is perfectly fine when the audience has access to everything the filmmaker is trying to communicate. However, when you’re blind and the film doesn’t have audio description, that approach can turn the experience into an absolute slog. There are extended sequences where I have very little context for what’s happening, what the characters are doing, or why certain moments are supposed to matter. I can appreciate what Flynn is bringing to the material, but I can’t necessarily appreciate the material itself when so much of it is being communicated visually. Meanwhile, Reilly, who was one of my primary reasons for watching the film in the first place, doesn’t make nearly the impact I was hoping he would. He’s certainly not bad, but his presence isn’t enough to elevate the experience.

The film eventually arrives at a train sequence that I found particularly confusing, although I suspect that has as much to do with the lack of audio description as anything else. From what I could gather, the train is attempting to reach another town, but someone standing on the tracks is somehow preventing it from moving forward. Now, I’m certainly not an expert on nineteenth-century locomotives, but even when trains traveled considerably slower than they do today, standing directly in front of one wasn’t exactly a brilliant survival strategy. A train would still obliterate someone standing in its path. That’s not a particularly solid life choice, regardless of what century you’re living in. Perhaps there’s something about the staging of this sequence that would have made it more understandable to me, but without audio description, I was left trying to piece together what was happening from the dialogue and sound effects alone.

I’m sure A Prayer for the Dying isn’t the worst film of the year, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it features some impressive cinematography. There’s clearly an attempt to create something atmospheric and contemplative, and I can respect that ambition even if I couldn’t fully experience the results. However, I found the film incredibly slow, and aside from Flynn’s performance and some decent acting elsewhere, there wasn’t much for me to grab onto. It’s based on Stewart O’Nan’s 1999 novel, which has taken more than two decades to reach the screen, and shouldn’t be confused with the entirely unrelated 1987 film A Prayer for the Dying, which featured a pretty substantial cast of its own. This adaptation might have more to offer someone who can appreciate its visual storytelling, but that wasn’t the experience available to me.

So, in what will probably be one of my shorter reviews, I simply couldn’t get much out of A Prayer for the Dying. My prayer is that more independent films will start treating audio description as an essential part of their distribution plans rather than something they can conveniently ignore. Perhaps when this film eventually finds its way to a streaming platform like Prime Video, someone will provide an audio description track, even if that means resorting to text-to-speech narration, so that I can at least understand what I’m supposed to be experiencing. I’d certainly prefer a professionally produced track, but at this point, some context would be better than none. Until then, I’m left with a film that has a couple of talented actors, an interesting premise, and far too many moments where I simply don’t know what’s happening. For now, and quite possibly forever, this is not a recommendation.

Rotten: 5.7/10