‘The Settlers’ Review: Writing the History of Modern Chile, in Blood

Not long after the Chilean film “The Settlers” opens — after the first shot has been fired and the first blood spilled — an aristocratic-looking horseman rides up to some workers on a grassy plain. Wearing a wide-brim hat and a mustache, a scarf around his neck, he settles into a spacious tent. There, seated at a desk set on a handsome rug, he summons his foreman, whom he instructs to find a route to the Atlantic for his sheep. To accomplish this, he coolly explains, “you will have to clean the island” — a grotesque, civilized euphemism for murder.

Among the more unsettling shocks in “The Settlers,” a harrowing, historically based drama that takes place in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago in the southernmost part of South America, is its time period. It opens in 1901 on a vast plain framed by sloping hills and grazed by both sheep and long-necked guanaco (a relative of the llama). During the day, the small team of men erect a wood and metal fence so impossibly long that its terminus disappears into the horizon. At night, the workers cluster around campfires, gnawing on roasted meat. It’s a scene reminiscent of old and new westerns, though not one like this.

The aristocrat is Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), who, like the Scottish foreman, Alexander MacLennan (an effective Mark Stanley), is a villain so flamboyant and outlandish that he seems fake but is in fact based on a real figure. (You may recognize Castro from his roles in Pablo Larraín movies like “No” and “Tony Manero.”) Shortly after Don José delivers his instructions to MacLennan, the foreman sets out on his bloody mission accompanied by Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), a young mestizo with sharpshooter skills, and by Bill (Benjamin Westfall), a coarse white American gun for hire. On horseback, they cross a vast, rough and heart-skippingly beautiful land into unspeakable horror.