Bacurau (2019)
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Bacurau Movie Review
Bacurau is a 2019 Brazilian western crime film directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho. It’s such a frustratingly odd, very unappealing movie.
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“Do you want to die or live?“
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After the death of her grandmother, Teresa comes home to her matriarchal village in a near-future Brazil to find a succession of sinister events that mobilizes all of its residents. Let’s start with the positives first. The opening of the film which introduces to us what was originally a terrific premise is great. It hooks you in the story, it sets up the titular town wonderfully and it simply felt very intriguing, mysterious and instantly memorable.
But unfortunately, I now have to stop with the positives as there are no more to speak of in terms of storytelling itself. Yes, this is one of those movies that are just weird for the sake of being weird. It is supposed to have some social commentary in it, but I personally did not find it, and I did not even care to find if it had been there having in mind how immensely irksome this viewing experience turned out to be for me.
Bacurau is somewhat difficult to put into clear genres. It is mostly a weird version of a standard western with strong crime elements and some science-fiction elements as well because it happens in the near future and it heavily relies in some scene on high-tech, especially drones. But those SF elements came and went by pretty quickly, the violence also was overwhelming and it left rarely any character properly developed.
The acting is solid as everybody did deliver fine performances, but the characterization is very poor and literally every single character here is overly strange, not particularly well defined and sometimes things just happen to the characters, and some plot points just happen out of thin air with no clear or satisfactory explanation given whatsoever.
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Technically speaking, Bacurau is fine. The cinematography is particularly good as some takes are truly excellent. But having in mind that it’s so off-puttingly strange, it was very difficult to sit through. It’s thus a rare Brazilian misfire for me that had a good first act, but a terrible second one and an almost unwatchable third act.
Seldom have I seen a more off-putting picture than Bacurau. The only good things in it are the technical aspects and that excellent opening which had been instantly memorable and intriguing before the film turned horrible, and downright unwatchable near the end. Its mixing of different genres is not done well at all, it seems authentic, but wrongly so, and it’s simply filled with so many utterly bizarre, ridiculous plot points that represent not bold, but bad storytelling which favors style and “originality” over true substance and meaning.
