Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Year: 2019
Though the politics are rarely front and centre in the narrative with Mendonça Filho’s work, they’re always present, and a point of view inevitably emerges, usually just as things start to get weird.
KMF’s 2019 masterpiece offers the promise of a thoughtful rural social drama, as a doctor returns to her home town to say a final farewell of her grandmother, but as odd things start to occur, outsiders arrive and people start to end up dead, it becomes abundantly clear that things won’t end well. The violence that unfolds is deftly woven into a parallel storyline about a corrupt local politician, and as the strands begin to come together, it becomes clear that Bacurau is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, entering enters slyly before unleashing havoc.
Bacurau is a delirious genre-bender – modern Western, us-vs-them revenge thriller, and an anti-colonialist piece that lays bare the violence of capitalist entitlement as it disenfranchises and annihilates those it deems disposable. It righteously up-ends the horror trope of the nice, blameless white people being terrorised by the psychotic villagers they encounter. In quiet little Bacurau, one’s uppance will surely come. Horrifyingly, its premise is based on real events in the Balkans in the 1990s – to avoid spoilers, look that up after you watch the film.
Come for the chaos, stay for the lately passed Udo Kier, spectactular and chilling here as an entrepreneur with a particularly unpleasant business model. Bacurau is also notable for its ensemble of amateur actors – in particular, it marks the debut of septuagenarian Tânia Maria, now catapulted to heroic status in film-going Brazil for her role in The Secret Agent.
Trophy hunters, psychotropic drugs, political corruption, the searing landscape of Pernambuco and the funeral of a beloved matriarch all knit together wonderfully in this peculiar but cohesive and beautifully shot piece which escalates marvellously over its 2+ hours. Not everything is explained – not everything needs to be. The point lands beautifully without the need for hand-holding. A masterclass in ‘fuck around and find out’.