Chile's Oscar entry isn't exactly cheerful, feel-good material.
A local don (Alfredo Castro) orders a Scottish soldier (Mark Stanley) to lead an expedition across his lands to ensure that they're claimed from the government. Joining him is a violent American mercenary (Benjamin Westfall) and a Chilean mestizo (Camilo Arancibia), but in truth, the expedition is a hunting party against the Ona people, natives of Tierra del Fuego...
At just over an hour and a half, there's no doubt that 'The Settlers' is one of those movies that deliberately makes you feel every minute of it. The movie itself is gorgeous to look at, with the grainy cinematography evoking a Spaghetti Western feel mixed with the natural beauty of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. That's about as far as it goes for anything soft and enjoyable in 'The Settlers'. For the rest of it, you're staring down the barrel at a relentlessly grim tale of casual murder, high thievery, unashamed racism - all handily packaged into colonisation.
On the surface, you could imagine vague similarities between 'The Settlers' and Lance Daly's 'Black 47', which saw an Irish soldier returned home during the Famine set off on a bloody campaign of vengeance against his colonisers. Here in 'The Settlers', it's told from the other side. Mark Stanley's taciturn soldier has been cast down and has all kinds of grudges residing in his chest. The American mercenary, played with real gusto by Benjamin Westfall, wants nothing more than a chance to kill people. Camilo Arancibia, however, is the mystery compared to the other two. As he is a mestizo - a person born of European and indigenous parents - there's a question over where his loyalty lies, either to the colonisers or his own people.
It's a tension that carries through for most of the movie, where we find each of the characters checking each other nervously to see if one's going to kill the other, all while trying to rid the land of natives and ensure their paymaster's favour. It's only later, when the ever-reliable screen menace that is Colin Spruell turns up as a vicious British military officer that there's a wider appreciation for what's going. Ultimately, it's about class and race as tools of domination for preserving themselves. Later, when the movie jumps forward a few years, the wild and violent methods are now blunted down and must be homogenised in order to suit a new vision for the country.
Understandably, 'The Settlers' is weighty, heavy material and deserves to be taken seriously. That isn't to say, however, that the themes and the story can't be explored in a way that is less punishing to the audience. Again, 'Black 47' was able to make a revisionist Western with colonialism as a system and retain a cynical, bitter edge to it. Even with 'Killers of the Flower Moon', the brutality was kept intact and sustained over three hours, but still managed to keep audiences engaged without crushing them. Nevertheless, 'The Settlers' makes for a grimly fascinating exploration of the savagery and the falsehoods on which nations are built.