‘The Settlers’: Cannes Review

Dir: Felipe Galvez. Chile, Argentina, UK, Taiwan, France, Denmark, Sweden, Germany. 2023. 97 mins.

A particularly horrific episode in Chile’s colonial history is explored, and partially fictionalised, in this savage if tonally uneven historical drama, a debut from Felipe Galvez, whose short film screened in Critics Week in 2018. The Settlers shows promise: it’s the work of a daring director intent on developing a distinctive and original voice. And while it falls slightly short of its bold ambitions, it should find a receptive audience on the festival circuit. The real-life genocide of Chile’s indigenous population is an element of the country’s history that is not widely acknowledged. Galvez, a former editor, confronts this brutal part of Chile’s history with this film, but his decision to also include several lurid fictional digressions may be contentious.

A mythic, Western quality

The year is 1901, the setting is the vast and fertile expanse of Tierra Del Fuego – land which is owned by wealthy rancher José Menendez (Alfredo Castro), a real historical figure. It is at the behest of Menendez that three men – British army captain MacLennan (Mark Stanley), American mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall) and a young mixed-race Mestizo tracker Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) – are sent to ride out through the land with the mission of establishing a safe route to the coast. Given considerable leeway on how this should be achieved, the men embark on a murderous spree, persecuting and slaughtering the indigenous Selk’nam people. 

The Settlers is divided into two tonally contrasting sections. The first part takes on a mythic, Western quality, complete with emphatic red intertitles announcing key characters or archetypes, such as The Half Blood and The Red Pig. This section builds towards an explosion of demented excess, and an encounter with the malevolent Colonel Martin (Sam Spruell, on gloriously monstrous form). The use of music in the first section of the film is as jarring as the subject matter: percussive, warlike – at one point it sounds like someone trapped inside a piano trying to smash their way out with a hammer.

In contrast, the second part, set seven years later and largely contained within the moneyed comfort of Menendez’s Punta Arenas drawing room, is more austere and restrained, as government official Vicuna (Marcelo Alonso) visits, to investigate and redress the crimes committed against the Selk’nam people. But even his good intentions are framed within a coloniser’s gaze, a fact that is neatly conveyed by a sequence in which he belligerently attempts to choreograph a photograph of Segundo and his now wife Kiepja (Mishell Guaña).

As a character, Segundo, who is half Mapuche and half Spanish, is one of the film’s more unexpected and uncomfortable elements. Of the three men who embark on the trip, he is the one with whom we instinctively sympathise; it is through his watchful eyes that we view the mounting carnage and frenzy of aggression. A target of the casual, deadly racism of Bill, Segundo is, we assume, the closest thing we have to a moral compass in this lawless, murky landscape. But then Gálvez shows him to be not only complicit in the crimes, but also a perpetrator. Arancibia is a compelling presence in a predominantly silent and reactive role; elsewhere, the performances can be rather more inconsistent, an issue that undermines some of the ferocious impact of the storytelling.