Cinema Travelogue

The Settlers, Chile’s submission for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards, is a gruesome look at the country’s bloody foundation through gnarly, picturesque landscapes and the disturbed minds that wandered through them. It is a revisionist western that reflects on its country’s hideous ways of sanitizing its history by representing them through its own sense of aesthetics. The use of extremely long camera lenses blurs the edges of a frame and pays more emphasis on the actors’ faces in the middle – leading to more confrontational close-ups. It is a much more honest look, but the film still takes some faults in offering sensationalist pleasures from its brutality through a very bombastic score and several rough editing choices. Director Felipe Galvez sets up his perspective by tracking three horsemen – a mixed-blood Chilean, an American mercenary, and a former British soldier across their hunting spree of indigenous people. The film wonders through its astounding visuals in search of a connectible main character. The threads of conflicted identity and political ideology reach dead ends; its thematic threads soon turn ridiculous and pompous. As a result, the film is similar to its landscapes – hauntingly gorgeous yet still waiting to be explored.