Rating: NR | Runtime: 147 minutes
Release Date: February 28th, 2024 (France) / September 20th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Le Pacte / Film Movement
Director(s): Lisandro Alonso
Writer(s): Lisandro Alonso, Martín Caamaño & Fabian Casas

Time is a fiction invented by man.

There’s little that’s literal about Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka. He himself says it’s his most complex film in that it would be as difficult to put into words as a painting. There are definite through lines, however. Indigenous Americans. Birds. Desperation. It’s a journey outside of time and space that metaphysically shifts perspectives from fictionalization to reality and human to animal. One chapter leads to the next as dreams are shattered, families broken apart, and survival proven to be an arduous undertaking not for the faint of heart.

Alonso and his co-writers Martín Caamaño and Fabian Casas start things in black and white full frame. It’s a western starring Viggo Mortensen as Murphy, a father searching for his disappeared daughter in a wild, lawless town of prostitutes and murderers he has no problem killing to achieve his goal. Then they move to widescreen color in South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation to follow a police officer (Alaina Clifford) and a youth basketball coach (Sadie LaPointe) hanging on by a thread to existences marked by unavoidable fatigue. And finally things shift to Brazil and a native (Adanilo) forced into exile along a prospecting riverbank who finds his dreams constantly shattered by the greed and jealousies of other men.

The first two chapters are connected by Chiara Mastroianni—a character in Murphy’s world and an actor researching a role in Alaina’s. The second two are bonded by a jabiru mycteria—a bird one character becomes before traveling south to claim another. Don’t therefore count on an actual passageway as much as a thematic one. Think more about parents and children. Prejudiced laws and the criminalization of sorrow. Dreams of escape and the prisons of reality. It’s a rather depressing set of circumstances wherein hope ultimately comes from death. Relief from the hardships of our world through the peaceful promise of eternity.

It’s a contemplative piece that moves at a glacial pace to live in its anguished weariness. Many moments unfold in silence whether shooting basketballs, panning for gold, or waiting for someone’s arrival. The imagery is beautiful shot and the performances are achingly real if sometimes obviously untrained. And the message is clear as far as how insufficient the resources for native people in the Americas are. Don’t expect any answers, though. Heck, don’t expect many questions either. Alonso and company are simply holding up a mirror onto the burden carried upon the exasperated shoulders of the displaced and marginalized.

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A scene from EUREKA; courtesy of Film Movement.