The Settlers

MUBI

The Settlers (Los Colonos), the feature debut from Felipe Gálvez Haberle, comes to UK cinemas after a strong showing at last year’s Cannes. It’s a bracing thing. The film is both unflinching and resolute in its steely-eyed examination of a brutal chapter of history, the murder of Chiléan indigenous people in the Selk’nam genocide, a story so often untold.

We are in Chilé at the end of the nineteenth century. Haberle places us with Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley), a British soldier working for oligarch José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), charged with clearing some of his newly grabbed land of the indigenous population who remain. He brings along Segundo (a superbly restrained Camilo Arancibia), our protagonist and the film’s sympathetic core, as well as Bill (Benjamin Westfall), an American mercenary famed for the number of Commanche he has murdered, on this vicious odyssey.

The film takes this classic western trope, establishing a small band of characters and setting them off on an expedition, but foregrounds the violence and cruelty at the heart of their quest, with every encounter they stumble upon drawing more and more out of them, and further brutality into the story. It’s a beautiful landscape that they wander, earthier than Monument Valley; it has an almost psychedelic quality, a series of parched greens rolling into deep yellows, one that cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo makes sublime use of.

What the film does particularly well is knowingly playing with and interrogating its position as a western. It owes a lot to the classics of the genre, particularly John Ford’s loose structures and Red River’s combination of landscape spectacle and creeping paranoia, the tense three-way conversations all built on shifting sands of distrust. The soundtrack too plays its part in this, in moments drifting into a gutted, craggy take on classic western bombast.

This loose structure may grate somewhat, particularly as its depictions of violence and cruelty grow more and more intense in the middle act, but it makes the actions of the trio feel like another speck in a machine of violence, both in this specific historical case and also as enacted by colonisers worldwide throughout history. The structure pays dividends in its latter stages. Without spoiling anything, the film’s third act is a remarkable left turn that cements its quality, and is astonishingly well managed for a first-time film-maker, handling the shift in tone and style with real poise and delicacy.

The Settlers contains an intense hopelessness, of humanity at its cruellest with few moments of anything approaching light; but it is a film of absolute necessity, one that in its very existence offers something approaching hope.

The Settlers is in cinemas from 9 February 2024

-Joe Creely-