Film Forum — The Settlers

 

The Settlers’ 

Writing the History of Modern Chile, in Blood

Not long after the Chilean film “The Settlers” opens — after the first shot has been fired and the first blood spilled — an aristocratic-looking horseman rides up to some workers on a grassy plain. Wearing a wide-brim hat and a mustache, a scarf around his neck, he settles into a spacious tent. There, seated at a desk set on a handsome rug, he summons his foreman, whom he instructs to find a route to the Atlantic for his sheep. To accomplish this, he coolly explains, “you will have to clean the island” — a grotesque, civilized euphemism for murder.

Among the more unsettling shocks in “The Settlers,” a harrowing, historically based drama that takes place in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago in the southernmost part of South America, is its time period. It opens in 1901 on a vast plain framed by sloping hills and grazed by both sheep and long-necked guanaco (a relative of the llama). During the day, the small team of men erect a wood and metal fence so impossibly long that its terminus disappears into the horizon. At night, the workers cluster around campfires, gnawing on roasted meat. It’s a scene reminiscent of old and new westerns, though not one like this.

The aristocrat is Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), who, like the Scottish foreman, Alexander MacLennan (an effective Mark Stanley), is a villain so flamboyant and outlandish that he seems fake but is in fact based on a real figure. (You may recognize Castro from his roles in Pablo Larraín movies like “No” and “Tony Manero.”) Shortly after Don José delivers his instructions to MacLennan, the foreman sets out on his bloody mission accompanied by Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), a young mestizo with sharpshooter skills, and by Bill (Benjamin Westfall), a coarse white American gun for hire. On horseback, they cross a vast, rough and heart-skippingly beautiful land into unspeakable horror.

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“The Settlers” tracks MacLennan and his small, uneasy group across Tierra del Fuego, which stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and includes both present-day Argentina and Chile. It’s a still, lonely expanse characterized by grassy plains, jagged mountains and a smattering of forest, and certainly part of the movie’s initial allure is its natural setting. In the early 16th century, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan named the region Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) after the bonfires set by native people; several centuries later, Charles Darwin traversed the body of water at the region’s base that came to be called Beagle Channel.

The Chilean director Felipe Gálvez, who wrote the script with Antonia Girardi, makes strategic use of the area’s beauty from the start, using its wonders to seduce you and hold you rapt even as the story grows progressively grim. Divided into sections, it opens with the sounds of drums and an elliptical quote from Thomas More’s 1516 satire, “Utopia,” emblazoned on a blood-red intertitle. A devourer of men, Menéndez is a wealthy Spanish colonizer and rancher who wants to control everything in sight at the expense of everyone. He is the power building the fence, enclosing the land and helping write the history of modern Chile.

Gálvez’s work here is by turns blunt and subtle, and very assured. (It’s his feature debut.) As the camera sticks close to Segundo, a question mark of a character and uneasy moral compass, the story progresses elliptically with pockets of quiet, naturalistic dialogue and a sense of mounting outrage. A sadist, MacLennan also proves to be a self-interested dissembler; Bill is largely a blunt instrument as well as an emblem of American imperialism. Together they ride across the country until they spot a column of smoke rising from some woods where they find a group of Indigenous people that they quickly and mercilessly slaughter.

The men press on, continuing a journey that by turns dips into Joseph Conrad territory and takes a freaky detour into Cormac McCarthy land. At one point, the three encounter a group of men serving as the protective detail for a surveyor; later, they stumble upon a band of near-feral renegade soldiers. The most harrowing scene, though, in this very fine movie takes place years later inside a hushed, lavishly appointed mansion with gilt flourishes and a piano where Don José and his adult daughter (Adriana Stuven) entertain a priest and a visiting politician as an Indigenous maid stands against a wall. “We’ve killed many savages,” the daughter says with a firm voice and perfect manners, “and will continue, if necessary.”

The Settlers

Not rated, but there are disturbing scenes of murder and rape. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.

The SettlersNYT Critic’s Pick

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DirectorFelipe Gálvez Haberle

WritersAntonia Girardi, Felipe Gálvez Haberle, Mariano Llinás

StarsSam Spruell, Mark Stanley, Alfredo Castro, Mariano Llinás, Emily Orueta

RatingNot Rated

Running Time1h 37m

GenresCrime, Drama, History, Western

Movie data powered by IMDb.com

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 12, 2024, Section C, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: In a Sweep of Beauty, Harrowing Brutality. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe