The Settlers

Chile, 1901. Intent on expanding his holdings, notorious cattle rancher José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) dispatches a trio of gunmen to the southern reaches of Tierra del Fuego to scout and scourge the land. A former British infantryman, MacLennan (Mark Stanley) has nominal command, though rancid American roughneck Bill (Benjamin Westfall) has his own ideas about that, while mestizo Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) knows a word out of place could result in a bullet in his back. Their odyssey across a forbiddingly harsh, ugly-beautiful terrain includes tense, fractious encounters with other colonists and bloody skirmishes with indigenous groups.

Evocative of the work of Cormac McCarthy in its commitment to brutal truth-telling (although much of the violence takes place off-screen, it doesn’t feel that way) this South-western makes no bones about its searing critic of white supremacist foundational myths; myths that apply right across the Americas. What’s most impressive, though, is the stunning, elemental imagery limned by DP Simone D’Arcangelo and Harry Allouche’s striking, scratchy score. The Settlers can be a hard ride, but it’s not one you’ll forget in a hurry.

A Chilean Killers of the Flower Moon companion piece… Felipe Gálvez’s masterful debut offers an alternative artistic road map for dealing with historical horrors.

Christian Blauvelt, Indiewire

’Set in 1901, The Settlers (Los Colonos), a scorching Western on Chile’s blood-soaked national myth, takes aspects from the official text-book history and probes at their conveniently sanitized interpretations of how they shaped the country’s future. Tonally, the imposingly assured debut feature from writer-director Felipe Gálvez falls somewhere in between Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale and Lucrecia Martel’s Zama by way of John Ford’s The Searchers. Grade: A.

Carlos Aguilar, The Playlist