The Settlers: A Stylish Chilean Neo-Western On A Brutal Theme

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Compellingly artful if dramatically blunt, The Settlers is Chile’s entry into the best International picture Oscar race, a kind of Western that critiques the reasons for the genre.

This first-feature from Felipe Galéz is set in 1901. In English and Spanish, it’s set on the grasslands of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago where, in classic Western style, it follows a mission by three men at the bequest of their rancher boss Don José Melendez, to “clean the island” to make a route to drive his sheep to the Atlantic shore.

Unfolding in titled in chapter headings and shot by cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo’s in the old-fashioned squarish academy ratio with zoom and pan shots and a tympani-heavy orchestral score, the film does nothing to hide its connections to the genre of John Ford or Sergio Leone.

Here we have three non-amigos on a “civilizing” mission. The foreman, Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley), a Scotsman and Boer war veteran, wears his incongruous British army red coat across the mountain-ringed terrain. Next is Bill (Benjamin Westfall), an insubordinate mercenary from Texas. The third member, and our unreliable point of view on the mission, is the largely silent mestizo marksman, Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) pulled from the fence-building gang.

Soon enough, we find that to “clean the island” means washing the landscape in the blood of its current inhabitants. When they see a smoke plume, they close in on Indigenous village and, in a scene of smoke-filled mayhem, kill all except for a woman survivor that the white men rape. Segundo, against his will, is forced to commit a different act of violence.

Filled with racism, violent competitiveness, and homoerotic encounters, The Settlers crams in all the stuff you might suspect but never made it into traditional Hollywood Westerns, treated here as tools of colonial propaganda.

More specifically, Galéz aims to bring attention to the real-world genocide of the 4,000 Selk’nam people who lived on Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago at the foot of South America, a crime that was only officially recognized by the Chilean government last year.

Several of the characters in the film are based on historical characters, including the land baron, José Menendez and the psychopathic MacLennan, a man known as “The Red Pig” for the savagery of his crimes both verified and rumoured.

The intentional stylization of the film, along with unintentional uneven acting and stilted dialogue, tend to keep the violence at an emotional remove. But around the point you feel you’ve been subjected to enough of this, Galéz changes the time and locale with chilling effect.

In the film’s last third, the film shifts from intimate violence to its more refined cousin — civilized, contemptuous denial of the crimes. We move from the bloody frontier to the grand mansion of Don José and his adult daughter (Adriana Stuven) as they wait with a priest friend for the arrival of a bespectacled government inspector Vicuna (Marcelo Alonso), who is investigating the rumours of a genocide against the Selk’nam. Don José dismisses the stories as tabloid fodder, but his daughter is more forthright. Yes, we’ve killed a lot of savages but look how much we do for them.

In the epilogue, the film shifts tone again, from bitterness to pathos, as the inspector tracks down to mestizo sharpshooter Segundo, living in seclusion on a fishing island with his wife Kiepja (Mishell Guaña), an escapee of the genocide, as they are forced to participate in the inevitable handwashing government propaganda project.

The Settlers. Directed by Felipe Gálvez. Written by Gálvez and Antonia Girardi. With Mark Stanley, Camilo Aranciia, Benjamin Westfall, Alfredo Castro, Sam Spruell, Adriana Stuven, and Luis Machin. In theatres in Vancouver January 19, in Montreal January 26, and in Toronto February 2 before moving to the MUBI platform later in the spring.