The Settlers

While building a seemingly endless fence somewhere in the wilds of Chile, a man suffers an accident that severs one of his arms. We see the bone protruding from what’s left of his limb as he insists “it’s just an arm” to his superior: Lieutenant Alexander MacLennan, who ignores the worker’s pleading and dispatches him with one quick shot. Several other laborers look on, keeping whatever fear or disgust they might be feeling to themselves lest they meet a similar fate.

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It’s 1901 in Tierra del Fuego, whose landscape is as evocative as its name. The region has yet to be tamed, not that it’ll stay that way for long. MacLennan is working for Don José Menéndez, who’s instructed the Scottish veteran to “clean” the archipelago in whatever way he sees fit — a bloody task for which the wayward soldier is all too eager. Joining the lieutenant on an expedition to the coast are an equally unscrupulous mercenary hailing from Texas and a mestizo sharpshooter named Segundo, the film’s de facto protagonist and the closest thing it has to a moral center. Dismissed as a “half-breed” and therefore of questionable loyalty, he’s also an audience surrogate whose horror at the atrocities committed by his cohort mirrors our own.

The Settlers, which is available to stream on Mubi, was directed by first-time helmer Felipe Gálvez, who co-wrote the script with Antonia Girardi. It’s a remarkably assured feature debut in which the passage of time, like quiet waves at low tide, slowly reveals the truth of a brutal chapter in Chile’s colonial history. Though Gálvez and Girardi acquit themselves well, the work of cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo is even more impressive. He opted to shoot on film in the boxy Academy ratio, giving the impression of a dreamy, era-appropriate artifact.

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The image blurs at the edge of the frame in much the same way it did in Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014), two equally stark Westerns to which this film feels like a cinematic cousin. Rarely have the ugliest aspects of humanity been captured with such arresting beauty. The cinematography quite literally glows at times, like a small, resilient campfire illuminating an otherwise pitch-black landscape in which anything — friend, foe, man, beast — could emerge from the darkness. It’s not often that a film set in uncharted land feels truly uncharted the way The Settlers does.

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For as visually striking as it is, The Settlers is also exceedingly literary. Opening with a quotation from Thomas More’s Utopia (“Your sheep now become so great devourers and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves”) and separated by chapters with such haughty titles as “The King of the White Gold” and “The Red Pig,” it almost feels as though it could have been adapted from a novel by Chile’s answer to Cormac McCarthy. (One of the most memorable scenes features two little girls singing “All the Pretty Little Horses,” a haunting lullaby whose title inspired McCarthy’s novel.) Dialogue is terse, even and especially when touching on grand subjects: “When men leave,” one of the few Indigenous survivors says late in a pivotal scene, “one never knows if they will be back.”

It’s not often that a film set in uncharted land feels truly uncharted.

It’s no coincidence that much of that dialogue is in English despite the film taking place in Chile. Like many of its genre forebears, The Settlers is about the dark, often ignored history of colonialism (its original Spanish title is Los colonos) — and, in this case, the Selk’nam genocide. The first half is told largely from the colonizers’ perspective, with Segundo powerless to do much more than look on and follow the lieutenant’s increasingly amoral orders, while the second jumps forward seven years and acts as a harsh reckoning of what we’ve already seen.

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The farther this trio strays from so-called civilization, the freer they are to disobey its rules and show their true selves — to “pursue their cravings,” as one officer who’s clearly taken leave of his senses puts it. History may be written by the winners, but there’s always room in the margins for the truth to emerge.

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