Disaster communism is given the weird western treatment in Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighbouring Sounds, Aquarius) and Juliano Dornelles’s wildly entertaining genre movie about a tight-knit community of oddballs in northern Brazil. En route to the village of Bacurau to attend her grandmother (and village matriarch) Carmelita’s funeral, Teresa (Bárbara Colen) encounters an overturned truck filled with empty coffins. Things only get weirder as she discovers that Bacurau has disappeared from Google Maps. The water supply has been cut off, there’s no phone service and numbing, highly addictive “mood inhibitors” are given out like sweets.
Sci-fi wipe transitions, 70s-style CinemaScope photography, a drone shaped like a UFO, and a cameo from German actor Udo Kier are clever genre flourishes that playfully deliver the film’s anticolonial politics. The drama unfolds in two parts: the first, a character study of the village itself; and the second, a bloody face-off mounted against its residents. Much of the fun is in the surprise element of the second act, so spoilers are best avoided.
