This sci-fi western will make your head spin
Bacurau Cert TBC, 132 min
★★★★★
Dir Kléber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles
Starring Sonia Braga, Udo Kier, Barbara Colen, Thardelly Lima, Jonny Mars, Chris Doubek, Karine Teles, Alli Willow
Bacurau, as well as being the Portuguese word for “nightjar”, is the name of an outlandish new film from Brazil and a village under siege. Like any fictional village, you couldn’t find it on a map, but one of the odder predicaments faced by locals in this jolting allegorical bloodbath is that, before long, neither can they. At a school, an elderly teacher tries to zoom in online to show his students their location, but it has gone.
Bacurau has seen carnage in the past, as we see when glimpsing contents of its small museum: ancient weapons and photographs of victory with guns aloft. Even in the present day, the citizens need a regular supply of coffins to be trucked up to them, as if anticipating – quite rightly – more slaughter to come.
This innocent-seeming idyll has the misfortune to be founded on the wrong side of a much-contested dam. But the shock, in this continually surprising film, is whom the village is about to be invaded by and why. At first, the template seems to be a classic western. Then, a
Ufo-shaped drone starts patrolling the village’s perimeter. Once two strangers on motorbikes, dressed in conspicuous tracksuits, have blazed in for a disconcerting chat, more or less anything goes.
The eagle-eyed might already have spotted the dedication on the school sign to “João Carpenteiro” (John Carpenter), the director who remade Howard Hawks’s film Rio Bravo as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976).
Even as it leaps into brain-splattering genre territory, though, the film still expects you to use your head. Let’s just say there’s a reason why Bacurau’s attackers, headed by Udo Kier, include a German, an Italian, an American and a South African, among others, and why the longest scene we spend with them nods to Brazil’s settlement story while folding in racist mockery of skin colour and national physiognomy.
Bacurau is missing a few layers – it’s odd that Barbara Colen, one of the top-billed actresses, comes home for her grandmother’s funeral and then recedes into the background. But the combination of satire and savagery is pretty fierce and intriguingly unique. The Most Dangerous Game, first filmed in 1932, may have cottoned on to the basic idea, and Carpenter certainly laid down a stylistic blueprint. But Bacurau, ominously fusing these elements to re-enact Brazil’s entire history of indigenous survival, leaves your preconceptions hacked up and rolling all over the place, like heads hitting the dirt.