‘The Settlers’ Review: Chile’s Brutal Colonial History is Indicted in a Visually Ravishing but Tonally Uncertain Drama

Jessica Kiang
·4 min read
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The setting is Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of the Americas, often called el fin del mundo, and though it is 1901 and the beginning of a new century, it certainly feels like the end of the world. It is in this feeling — the immersive sonic and visual textures of a past in which beauty and brutality snap and snarl at each other’s heels — that director Felipe Gálvez’ debut feature excels. “The Settlers” is a heady, opaque western, slow to stir but vicious as a rattlesnake when it does, that marks a highly promising debut, albeit one marred by dialogue and performances that are not always equal to the tectonic gravitas to which this tale of colonial atrocity aspires.

The hierarchy in these contested lands is established early, and sitting at its top is ruthless landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro, reliably charismatic but underused). Menéndez needs to establish a trade route so that livestock can be efficiently delivered from his vast ranches across wild terrain to the Atlantic, and not only does he not care about collateral damage, he almost explicitly states that the more Indigenous people slaughtered along the way, the better. (The Selk’nam, native to this region, were entirely wiped out during this period of Chilean history.)

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Menéndez chooses gruff Lieutenant MacLennan (Mark Stanley), a Scottish officer of the British army, to lead the expedition, but forces him to bring on wild-card Bill (Benjamin Westfall), a Texan mercenary who “can smell a Native from miles away,” though he looks none too fragrant himself. Finally, mixed-race guide Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) is plucked from a chain gang, on account of his superior marksmanship skills, to accompany them. On their stocky horses, plodding through majestic, forbidding landscapes, with MacLennan and Bill sniping at each other and Segundo silently looking on, this could be a John Ford movie, with a motley trio on the verge of some manly alliance.

But, hacked into chapters given lurid crimson titles — The King of White Gold; Half Blood; The Ends of the Earth; The Red Pig — this is no classic western. Galves’ script, co-written with Antonia Girardi, is far more nihilistic in its philosophies. Where the bonds of at least companionship might be expected to form, instead we get further mistrust and betrayal, amid bouts of grotesque barbarity that allow Bill to enlarge his trophy collection: a grisly string of severed human ears edged in black blood. Even Segundo, nominally the most sympathetic character, is forced into a kind of complicity in some of these crimes, doubtless accurately allegorizing the plight of many an Indigenous person trying to survive the relentless onslaught of invasion, but further contributing to an atmosphere of despair and depravity.

Every interaction, no matter with whom, inevitably culminates in violence, often of a sexual nature. Even an initially amicable meeting with a crew mapping the Chile-Argentina frontier ends up in a wrestling match that goes too far. The brutality is rarely graphic but so evocative that the weight of it infects even the film’s slower, ostensibly more peaceful passages with heavy dread. This all makes it jarring when scenes of Bill and MacLennan talking ring false: Their English dialogue has a stilted, non-native-speaker cadence and neither actor is quite able to encompass the different flavors of masculine rage and madness that their characters represent. We see them do and say terrible things, but somehow neither is as frightening as the cold glitter in Alfredo’s Castro’s eyes, when, after a seven-year jump forward, we return to Menéndez as he is being interviewed by state official Vicuña (Marcelo Alonso), who is investigating the worst of the band’s atrocities.

But if the storytelling sometimes wavers, the craft never does, and the world-building here is immaculately eerie. Harry Allouche’s score keeps pace with the disintegrating mood, the plucked strings and crude drumbeats of his often atonal compositions creating a musical landscape as bleak and strange as this desolate stretch of country. Simone D’Arcangelo’s cinematography is exceptional throughout, so haunting and spare that “The Settlers” almost classifies as a ghost western, particularly in one breathtaking sequence in which a massacre is somehow made mythical by being wrapped in thick mist. This sequence is emblematic of the very best of Galves’ flawed but striking first feature, evoking a powerful image of untrammelled, genocidal colonialist fury reduced to its basest, barest essentials: vicious men drunk on the idea of their unearned superiority, flailing around murderously in the fog of a war only they are fighting.

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