131 min | NR | March 6, 2020 | Kino Lorber
A remote village in the Brazilian backcountry vanishes from the map, the water stops, and armed strangers arrive looking for sport. The locals figure out the game before the hunters do. Mess with the wrong town.
Bacurau is a small village in the Brazilian sertão that has stopped appearing on the map. The phone signal dies. The water truck arrives with bullet holes. Strangers turn up asking friendly questions that are not friendly. The film opens as a portrait of a community and turns into a dystopian Western about who a society treats as disposable. The real subject is human beings hunted for sport and the politics that makes such a thing thinkable.
Bárbara Colen plays Teresa, who arrives home for a funeral and watches the village close ranks against a threat it cannot yet see. Colen gives her a watchful steadiness that anchors the chaos to come. Sônia Braga plays Domingas, the village doctor, and delivers a drunken graveside fury that announces the film’s refusal to mourn quietly. Thomás Aquino plays Pacote, a man with a violent reputation the village needs and keeps at arm’s length. Silvero Pereira plays Lunga, the outlaw the community calls on when survival requires a fighter, and Pereira makes the figure both mythic and human. Udo Kier plays Michael, the leader of the outsiders, with a bland courtesy that curdles into contempt.
Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles direct and write the film together. They shoot in widescreen and reach for the zoom lens, a deliberate echo of 1970s exploitation cinema and the spaghetti Western. The synth score pushes the same retro register and signals the horror before the horror arrives. The editing holds the village’s daily rhythms long enough that the violence lands as rupture rather than spectacle. The production design keeps the future one step from the present, which is what makes the allegory bite.
Bacurau works because it refuses to separate its pleasures from its politics. It is a genre film with a body count and a thesis. The village does not wait to be saved and does not ask permission to fight back. Mendonça Filho and Dornelles built a movie about the global south treated as a hunting ground and gave it the shape of a crowd-pleaser with teeth. The result is angry, strange, and completely in control of its tone.