Critics reviews

Not everything in this Leone-inspired Latino western hits its target, but the picture has a venomous bite, and a smart, slippery final scene that turns the lens back on to the act of film-making, questioning cinema’s role in (mis)shaping the way we view history.

Hugely ambitious and masterfully staged... [Gálvez Haberle] and his cinematographer, Simone D’Arcangelo, evoke spaghetti westerns with wide-angle vistas of forbidding horizons. Odd moments of Quentin Tarantino-style playfulness add to the unease. The perverse, atonal effect is as discombobulating as Harry Allouche’s plucked, appositely bleak score.

The Settlers, which Gálvez co-wrote with Antonia Girardi, might be analogous in its anti-colonialism to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) and Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017), but it hews closer to Sam Peckinpah’s allegorical Mexican Westerns and Alex Cox’s Walker (1987).

At its core, The Settlers is a film about capitalism and its discontents... this is the western as a dried, coruscating corpse, left out for the buzzards to feed on.

At its strongest, though, The Settlers is unsettling indeed, not least thanks to the complementary performances of Arancibia, British TV regular Stanley, and Alfredo Castro (Tony Manero, Post Mortem), whose sepulchral visage and silky delivery have made him Latin American cinema’s most reliably sinister presence.

The Settlers is really unsettling: an evocation of the violence and colonial brutality mixed into the foundations of Chile’s nation state, and which, it is implied, provided a lesson in political violence for later on... It’s a fierce, stark, almost primitive parable of cruelty and power.

Gálvez displays a savage understanding of colonisation, racism and the lengths people in positions of power will go to for money and control... Despite all the many themes the film touches on, it still manages to stay focused and nuanced, which is a great feat for The Settlers.

The Settlers closes with red-tinged archival images of Chile in the early 20th century: a potent, unsettling symbol of the blood-soaked identity of the nation and the continent.

[The Settlers] has both great visual beauty and the frequent quality of a hallucinogenic nightmare, reflecting its characters’ increasing dislocation and madness. Simone D’Arcangelo’s stunning cinematography captures various landscapes in rich, delicate colors... [The film's] combination of the poetical and cruel leaves a lingering, distinctive impression.

There’s a real integrity to his methodical deglorification of the Western… even if that results in a film that toggles between only two modes: meditative quiet and a numbing, unblinking brutality.

[Gálvez's] fragmented narrative—which favors gunmen emerging out of foggy nothingness over historical or character-based specificity—doesn’t earn the outraged reaction he’s reaching for. Instead, there are several nicely filmed vignettes of awful things being done that don’t add up to much at all.

The material is challenging and a little chilly, but Haberle’s stunning photography – coupled with note-perfect performances – are what make [The Settlers] compelling... All three actors are natural, forceful when they need to be, and the “lived-in” quality of the central performances gives the film a much-needed sense of verisimilitude.