Chile, 1893.  Under the employ of José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley), Bill (Benjamin Westfall), and Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) travel through the wilderness to mark out the wealthy businessman’s land.  Their job takes them deep into the country where the Onas people live, and acting on their orders, MacLennan and Bill do not hesitate to kill any of the natives they see on sight.  Segundo, though, a Chilean mestizo, cannot bring himself to kill the Onas and during an altercation with a band of colonists, he flees his party to start life elsewhere. 

Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s feature directorial debut The Settlers premiered at the Cannes Film Festival under its original title, Los colonos, where he was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize.  It was submitted by the country to the Academy Awards for Best International Feature, though it missed making the final ballot.  For most audiences, though, the film premiered some weeks after the ceremony on Mubi. 

Separated into 5 chapters, the film runs a surprisingly breezy 97 minutes given its heavy subject matter. This is largely because Segundo, while faced with challenges in the narrative to hold true to his morals never truly wavers in his convictions. There is little growth for his character to take across the events of the film because we never have any real doubt or sense of hesitation from him that he will betray himself. He does not want to kill.  He does not want to rape.  His moral beacon is admirable, but as a lead character, it places him in an incredibly passive position where he is experiencing the story instead of leading it.  It is not until the final chapter that this moral friction between the European settlers and the native people really begins to spark, and even then, the fire bringer is more so Kiepja (Mishell Guaña) than it is her husband who appears to have taken kinder to the idea of assimilation. 

While it feels like we are missing quite a lot in the time jump between the last two chapters, what we do see transpire – a microscopic war of the wills – really takes the film’s thesis and presents it in a tangible way with both sides facing off most directly here than even earlier when the air was littered with gunfire. “Do you want to be a part of this nation?” asks the European cameraman of the Ona woman while on Ona land. Show the European people you belong here, he continues, as he prompts Kiepja to drink her European tea while wearing a European dress in front of the lens of a European filmmaker’s European camera working for a European audience.  It is in this final third where Haberle’s film is at its most poignant because it has stripped away the sense of danger that comes from the wilderness, the danger of strangers encountered in said wilderness, and instead focuses point blank on the dangerous greed of man.  Menéndez and his ilk have come to this land, seized it, and now want those who he displaced to show that they have been broken and tamed by the Crown.  Kiepja will not comply. 

Though it is not until late in the film that The Settlers really comes together narratively, what comes before it is a really beautiful film to behold.  Simone D’Arcangelo’s cinematography actively avoids the sepia tones often thought of in conjunction with images of the time, but there is still a gritty realism to each image we see that such photography evokes.  This is a dangerous world and each pebble and branch exists in the frame with the characters.  The colors are both vibrant and dirty at the same time which gives each image just an incredible texture, and as his lens takes in the beautiful scenery and harrowing performances, Harry Allouche’s score pulls influence from many of the epic Westerns to help convey the immensity of the land that is limited by the confines of the frame.  The power of the exterior compositions is most apparent when the film is transported into Menéndez estate. Most intriguingly, the light levels stay the same so even the safety which is implied by the stately painted and papered walls still feels cold as if those whose blood was shed and whose backs were broken to erect such a manor still haunt the halls. The children’s song hangs in the cold air. The candles and lamps do not provide warmth. There is a sadness here that, the longer it is ignored, the more ferocious it presents itself and the residents live in a shadow they refuse to recognize but are unable to escape.  

The Settlers plays out like the prequel to a genocide; a film very much in conversation with the likes of Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona (2019), Pedro Almodóvar‘s Parallel Mothers (2021), and especially Pablo Larraín‘s El Conde (2023) all modern reckonings of the scars of colonialism, but notably Arancibia keeps the events in their historical context so modern audenices are forced to apply their lens to this tragedy without being able to hide behind metaphor are artistic flourishes.  The Settlers very explicitly takes place in the midst of the Selk’nam genocide, though it does not focus only on the minutiae of violence, but rather channels that energy into the brutal tone that guides the film.  Thankfully, it does not revel in gratuitous violence, but in those moments where the band of settlers break free from operating in the margins and merely insinuate the havoc they will wreck, those pointed moments are made all the more powerful. The implication of their actions shakes and rattles like echoing thunder, but MacLennan and Bill are unafraid. It is in those moments that they become monsters, and by comparison, Segundo a beacon for hope and endurance, but with each pull of the trigger or violent thrust of the colonists, that beacon slowly fades out to a flicker.  The Settlers is a wonderfully composed film, and while there is a lot to be said in what is left unsaid, as an audience we are begging to see more of Segundo. There is too much left for us to fill in, and Arancibia gives such a wonderful performance that it goes beyond being understated and we end up feeling cheated out of a more complete narrative.