The Settlers: A masterfully staged film styles Chile’s genocidal past as a spaghetti western to chilling effect

Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s hugely ambitious and masterfully staged debut feature starts as it means to go on: with the brutal killing of an injured labourer by his foreman.

Based on gruelling events from turn-of-20th-century Chile, The Settlers concerns a genocidal odyssey to Tierra del Fuego, the spartan archipelago at South America’s southern tip. The awful quest happens at the command of the savage landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), the baron and “King of White Gold” – or sheep – who pitilessly presided over much of Argentina and Chile in 1901.

Menéndez instructs three men – the cruel former British soldier MacLennan (Mark Stanley), the Apache-hunting veteran and American mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall) and the marksman and mestizo Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) – to venture into forbidding terrain in search of safe passage for his animals. Safe passage, in this context, means killing the native Ona population.

The murderous mission is punctuated by rape and historical horrors. There are no good guys: Bill keeps the ears of his victims as keepsakes, but there are more depraved characters than him along the harrowing trek. During one brutal sequence, a mercy killing is the least sickening option for the compromised Segundo.

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Even the title chapters that punctuate the film – The Ends of the Earth, The Red Pig – are grim. The writer-director 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.

A much-needed coda, set seven years after the main events in the film, sees the colonialist Menéndez interviewed by an investigator, Vicuña (Marcelo Alonso). In common with The Zone of Interest, this is a most deserving winner of a critics’ prize at Cannes.