THE SETTLERS (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Settlers, Mubi

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 11, 2024

When the violence comes in The Settlers, there's an almost casual mentality to that brutality. It's just a job for the three people at the center of this story, a trio of men assigned to clear a route from a wealthy man's Chilean farm to the Atlantic Ocean. Two of them seem to take unsettling pleasure in this work, which amounts to the mass slaughter of any indigenous people in the way of their planned path, and one, a man of mixed native and Spanish origin, can only stand by and watch.

This man, named Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), is our obvious stand-in for and entryway into this dramatization of a true story. In that way, co-writer/director Felipe Gálvez Haberle makes us direct witnesses to that horror, and in Segundo's inaction, it raises a couple of questions about the line between the act of helpless witnessing and the idea of passive complicity.

It's not as if Segundo, who's recruited by the wealthy man's right-hand man Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley) to join the expedition to the ocean, can do much to stop the businessman's ultimate plan. That man is José Menédez (Alfredo Castro), a Spaniard who has made his fortune ranching in the Patagonian region and, with the borders of Chile and neighboring Argentina being surveyed and drawn in that southern area of the continent in the early 20th century, wants to make a larger fortune for himself. The Chilean government, keeping close ties to oligarchs like Menédez, has granted the rancher the rights to all of the land he wants, so now, it's simply—in his mind—a matter of ensuring no one else inhabits it.

There are inhabitants, of course—people who lived in this region before Menédez or even his colonial ancestors arrived on the continent. They are the Ona, and at least half of Segundo's background comes from those indigenous people. What can he do about this? He is merely a laborer on Menédez's ranch, only possesses any real ties to his fellow workers and the requirements of his job, and remains just one man against what will become a genocidal campaign against the Ona. Like Segundo, we become witnesses to it, and also like him, we are more or less condemned by way of silence and inactivity.

Gálvez approach to this material mirrors the mentality on display here in a few notable ways. First, there's the film's look, which is reminiscent of an American Western in ways that go beyond the fact that the final member of the trio of expeditioners, a Texan named Bill (Benjamin Westfall), is a cowboy in dress and attitude. The director, with cinematographer Simone D'Arcangelo, gives us vast, sweeping shots of seemingly untouched terrain—wide fields and rolling hills beneath crowdedly cloudy skies—and men on horseback traversing the landscape.

The broad imagery here is romantic from the start, which sees Segundo and his fellow laborers putting up a wire fence on a small part of Menédez's vast property, but before the toil and the sunset backdrop can become routine, there's a commotion. Part of the wire has snapped. A man howls in pain. On his horse, MacLennan, a former officer of the British military (by his account, at least, which becomes important later), stands over the injured man, who has lost one of his arms in the accident. Declaring that a man without an arm in this kind of work is equal to an absent worker, MacLennan shoots him dead.

Immediately, Gálvez and co-writer Antonia Girardi's screenplay (written in collaboration with Mariano Llinás) makes it clear that violence is inevitable in this story, and when that violence arrives, it will be sudden, merciless, and enacted with relaxed attitude of cold, hard logic. If this is what MacLennan and his boss are willing to do to one of their own (The man is white, speaks English, and is dressed in a similar fashion to the Texan), what are they prepared to do to those whom they perceive as outsiders and obstacles to Menédez's goal?

Much of the story revolves around MacLennan, Bill, and Segundo's trek, as they ride, bicker and debate around various campfires, and encounter assorted people along the way. One group is a platoon from the Argentine military, accompanying a surveyor who's charting the country's border with Chile, and it's most telling that the commanding officer (played by Agustín Rittano) no sooner than meets MacLennan that the two men are organizing assorted competitions between their respective groups. MacLennan's boxing match with his Argentinian counterpart abandons any sort of rules before it's finished, and Segundo, who has proven himself to be an expert marksman with a rifle, has a shooting competition. That detail is important.

There is one scene depicting part of the mass murder being perpetrated here, although another is referenced in the film's hauntingly enigmatic epilogue. The perspective of it belongs to Segundo, who watches as multiple unarmed indigenous people are shot and killed. He doesn't participate, but despite having the weapon and the skill to put an end to it, Segundo does nothing. He only acts in the aftermath of the slaughter, in a disturbing scene that might appear to be mercy in his eyes but amounts to exactly what MacLennan and Bill have just perpetrated.

Except for the victims, no one's hands are clean in The Settlers, and that's the awful truth of this story and history. The epilogue, which changes the narrative's focus entirely, features no violence but is almost as casually brutal in the way it depicts history being re-written by, in their minds, the victors—in reality, the murderers.

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