REVIEW: Los colonos [The Settlers] [2023]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 97 minutes
Release Date: 2023 (Chile) / January 12th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: El Camino Pictures / MUBI
Director(s): Felipe Gálvez Haberle
Writer(s): Antonia Girardi & Felipe Gálvez Haberle

You will have to clean this island.

The first forty of so minutes of Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s The Settlers is a bit of a slog. Less because of the pacing—which is actually quite brisk—and more because of the content. Because we’ve seen this set-up many times before. A wealthy colonist in Chile who’s exploiting the land and its native people hires a former British soldier to set out east to the Atlantic and clear a path for his sheep. The path, of course, is unsafe because of the “Indians” who, in their mind, want nothing more than to kill every last one of them.

That soldier (Mark Stanley’s Lieutenant MacLennan) is a brute and the man he’s forced to take with him is a loudmouth opportunist (Benjamin Westfall’s Texan Bill). Thankfully we have half-Native Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) to provide actual humanity—a young man roped into helping because he knows the land and is a good shot with the rifle, but one who doesn’t quite understand what it is they’re doing until his compatriots slaughter a defenseless camp of women and children.

It’s a familiar if brutal trajectory marked by very theatrical, almost stilted performances when the “men” get bored and decide to proverbially measure their penises. My mind found itself occasionally drifting, trying its best to find a witty “A Redcoat, a Redneck, and an Indian walk into the Andes” joke as the plot more or less finds its way to the exact place you assume it will go. Segundo wants to kill his companions but can’t. The group cross paths with someone to put MacLennan in his place. And the nihilistic merry-go-round continues.

Except something does surprise. Credit Sam Spruell’s memorably monstrous performance as a fellow soldier wandering the continent, but also Haberle and co-writer Antonia Girardi for seemingly acknowledging that they cannot simply tread that well-worn path of tragedy. Where they take us remains tragic—nightmarishly so thanks to the stories Señor Vicuña (Marcelo Alonso) tells after a perfectly placed time jump. But it’s also utterly transfixing in its presentation of his hosts’ bigotry and his own cutthroat deceit.

The final forty minutes are intense (enough to turn Stanley’s MacLennan into an unrecognizable ball of hunched over fear) to show the true cost of colonialism as a tool for power. Because no matter who wields that power or deigns to allow others to wield it for them (in return for fealty), it’s always the rightful “owners” of that land who suffer. It doesn’t matter if they assimilate, lose their souls, or escape to live a simple life devoid of the greed that makes such a life impossible. The moment a stranger lands on that shore is the moment that peace ceases to exist.