The Settlers movie review: Chile’s official Oscars entry is a brutal and bleak companion piece to Killers of the Flower Moon

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As they travel across the Tierra del Fuego — a hell on Earth if there ever was one — the trio finds itself in increasingly horrific scenarios juxtaposed against the placid beauty of the landscape. To be clear, The Settlers isn’t a horror picture — the grammar of its storytelling is borrowed from old Westerns — although each new scene is more disturbing than the last. On the third or fourth day of their journey, the frontiersmen come across a camp. While it is initially implied that this might be an enemy settlement, the movie eventually reveals that these ‘adversaries’ were nothing more than a harmless family of indigenous people. This terrible episode sets into motion a tale of violence, depravity, and power, that unpacks the moral compromises involved in the Birth of a Nation.

Debutante director Felipe Gálvez Haberle has an uncompromising eye. There’s a quiet rage to this film, echoed in the almost painterly frames that the filmmaker creates with his cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo; frames that hide beneath their beauty a unique kind of brutality. Never before has a shot of three men discussing whether a horse once ridden can be eaten looked this stunning. It is all an illusion, Haberle appears to be saying — the economic progress, the technological advancement, the political evolution that governments boast about, when it has been accomplished on the back of murder, vengeance and greed.

The extermination of minorities is followed by a systematic erasure of the truth — every cowboy movie that John Wayne ever starred in is fundamentally guilty of denying the disturbing foundation upon which America was built. As Glazer showed in The Zone of Interest, opening museums in honour of the fallen millions (and charging an entry fee from wide-eyed tourists) is its own form of mundane horror. In many ways, The Settlers is a long-overdue dressing down of the Western genre itself. The vistas are just as vast as anything that Sergio Leone ever filmed, but you wouldn’t want a single frame of this movie as your wallpaper; the beauty has been blotted by bloodshed.

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The Settlers’ success as a film is steeped in the disheartening knowledge that anybody in the world could recognise the atrocities of their own country’s past in it. But it will, of course, play differently in Chile, a nation whose troubled history was recently revisited (in wholly different form) by Pablo Larraín in the film El Conde, a dark comedy about the vampiric Augusto Pinochet. The dictator stole from and oppressed the same generation of Chileans whose parents were probably responsible for the colonisation of the country. It’s a cruel cycle of violence, and rare is the movie that captures this idea with such bleak brevity.