‘The Settlers’ Review: Debuting Director Felipe Gálvez’s Provocative Look at Chile’s Colonial Past – Hollywood Reporter

There’s been a latest pattern in worldwide arthouse cinema that dates roughly again to 2 Argentine films of the previous decade: Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014).

Each movies informed darkish tales of European colonization, and the massacres inflicted on South America’s Indigenous populations, in ways in which felt altogether up to date, eschewing conventional narratives in favor of one thing extra enigmatic and fashionable. In such films, the previous was mirrored by way of the lens of the current. The characters all wore interval costumes and the units had been made to seem like they dated from the epoch, however the tales being informed, and the way in which they had been being informed, felt very a lot of our time, as if the horrors had been nonetheless with us.

This pattern continued, albeit in a extra playful sense, within the Italian movie The Story of King Crab (2021), and in a extra non secular sense within the Iceland-set Godland (2022), each of which premiered in Cannes. This yr, the competition provides one other tackle the style with The Settlers (Los Colonos), a debut characteristic from Felipe Gálvez that chronicles the genocide of Chile’s native peoples by the hands of Spanish landowners, who brutally massacred tribes within the Tierra del Fuego area as they constructed their agricultural empire.

Gálvez, who co-wrote the movie with Antonia Girardi, makes use of the template of a Western to inform his story, though it’s a Western carried by a postcolonial critique that step by step takes on the point of view of its sole Indigenous character, Segundo (Camilo Arancibia).

After we first meet him, Segundo is laboring with different native-born on a fence the Spanish are erecting to separate the pampas of Chile from neighboring Argentina. The work is ruthless and overseen by merciless masters who don’t have any qualms about killing the injured, so when Segundo’s knowledgeable marksman abilities get him recruited on a mission to clear grazing land all the way in which to the Pacific, it seems to be like he could also be getting a greater deal.

The mission has been commanded by José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), a robust participant in Chile’s rising economic system who’s as cruel as Daniel Plainview. Certainly, there might be blood on a treacherous journey that takes Segundo, a war-torn Scottish lieutenant (Mark Stanley) and an American mercenary, Invoice (Benjamin Westfall), who’s been imported from Texas, over mountains and throughout ravines till they attain the ocean.

For a lot of its opening and center sections, The Settlers features like a three-handed western the place the clashing personalities of Invoice and the lieutenant — who we discover out is, the truth is, a non-public — come to a head whereas Segundo silently seems to be on. Divided into chapters with headings, and backed by a rating from Harry Allouche with some echoes of Ennio Morricone, the movie can really feel a bit gimmicky when it leans too laborious into the trimmings of the style, carrying its postmodernism all too prominently on its sleeve.

However once we step by step study that the trio have been tasked with ridding the land of the Indigenous, issues take a decidedly darker flip and the true focus of The Settlers comes into gentle. The movie’s most harrowing sequence has Invoice and the lieutenant massacring a tribe of innocents, then raping a feminine survivor. Segundo tries to keep away from taking part, however he’s drawn into committing an act of violence he can’t escape from, which leaves him traumatized and stuffed with remorse. Even when he hails from a distinct tribe, he’s been pressured to show towards his personal individuals.

Shot within the Academy format by Simone D’Arcangelo, who did related work on The Story of King Crab, the movie seems to be like an artefact from an older time, slowly zooming and panning throughout the monumental landscapes the place the journey takes place. But whereas its stylings are purposely retro, its goals are very a lot of the right here and now. It is a movie that digs deep into Chile’s colonial previous — particularly throughout a closing part that transforms the story into considered one of historic reckoning.

However even then, Gálvez presents Segundo, whom the others consult with as “the half-breed,” much less as an unlikely hero than as a sufferer who was fortunate and resourceful sufficient to outlive a horrible second in Chile’s troubled delivery. Throughout The Settlers’ provocative epilogue, bold Chilean officers power the person to recount all that he noticed on his mission, together with one other terrible bloodbath, and he does so solely as a result of he’s as soon as once more given little alternative. This can be his nation’s historical past, however he needs no a part of it.