Bacurau review ★★★★★

In this tortured world of ours, isolation grows more appealing day by day. Imagine living in the middle of nowhere, away, far, far away, not dealing with issues outside of our control? Despite being a denial fantasy, it’s an awfully tempting one.

This isolated-village mentality crawls through Bacurau, the bizarre genre-clasher from Brazilian filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. The secluded town that titles the film is one of these nowhere places, filled with the heat and dust of a Sergio Leone Western, cut off from a suggestively dystopian world. And then there's the weird, psychotropic rituals that have a disturbing, Midsommar-like touch – starting with the funeral of a 94-year-old elder, whose coffin inexplicably fills with water.

Much of the peculiar pleasure of Bacurau is in its town and its folk: there’s a school, a chapel, a brothel, and even a history museum. We don’t have the pleasure of seeing inside many of them, lending an uncomfortable mystery to these buildings.

Teresa (Bárbara Colen) rides into town on a water truck on a dirt road, initially blocked by a spillage of coffins from an upturned vehicle. A bloody corpse lays disfigured nearby. We don’t know where she’s coming from, or where exactly she is. But, in retrospect, this feels like a narrative deception: she’s not the hero of the film. Nobody is.

The film proceeds with an enchanting, surreal domesticity – to the point where you give up guessing where the story goes and just enjoy the strange surprises. Yet there’s a patient evil pending, some harmful force creeping in from the outside world, first indicated by a flying saucer spinning near the town. Where are we? When are we? Even within the unpredictable context of Bacurau, this is a flummoxing turn of events.

Filho and Dornelles clearly love stretching their ambiguities and, for a while, the film shapes into a communal arthouse experience. But then, following their streak of surprises, they delve into genre territory. They ease into the classic plot of humble villagers seeking aid against a coming threat, essentially snatching from Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

The enemies circling around Bacurau are, for the most part, trigger-happy Americans who just love to kill people – shooting and talking like politically motivated cartoons. Although it’s always entertaining and liberating to watch an arrogant superpower mocked in this way, it’s a wafer-thin satire. The final confrontation tenses with the innate silence of the town, louder than brutal gunfire, more sinister than streaks of blood. But it’s an unfulfilling conclusion: Filho and Dornelles never go full Kurosawa on the town.

All these elements work together nicely enough, with a clear excitement to confuse as much as raise adrenaline. But the film, as a whole, feels like a muddled dream. There’s a fun, improvised quality to the writing, but Bacurau doesn’t know where it wants to be.


Bacurau is available to stream on MUBI now.