Bacurau (2019)

A masterpiece. This movie is a very faithful on how the remote Brazilian regions look like, and a very smart and realistic dystopian future movie, a genre that is very rarely well executed in Brazilian movies.

With over 200 credits on his résumé — often as a vampire or vampire-adjacent —, revered German actor Udo Kier has appeared in some very good films as well as some very bad ones; Bacurau, a retarded A Sound of Thunder/The Most Dangerous Game hybrid ripoff, falls in the latter category.

The beginning is more or less promising. Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima), mayor of the Sierra Verde municipality, to which Bacurau (which may or may not be the Portuguese word for 'bumf---') belongs, has blocked the dam and put it under the care of armed guards.

His reason for doing this, though, is not very clear; Tony’s seeking re-election, but I don’t think hijacking the water supply is going to get him a lot of votes. To wit, when he visits Bacurau, the locals all lock themselves in their houses, from which they cover him in insults; their bravura, however, never reaches the sticks-and-stones phase.

Oddly, the locals are so poor that their hatred of Tony does not preclude them from accepting the food he brings them, but not so poor that they don’t all have smartphones and/or tablets — and why wouldn’t they? Otherwise, the town’s Wi-Fi would go to waste.

So far good, I guess. Things only really go to hell when one of the residents sees a “drone” flying with all the grace of Gazoo’s spaceship (the drone is obviously computer generated until it “lands”; then it becomes a prop). The drone belongs to a group of foreigners led by Michael (Kier, sadly not playing a vampire).

Their plan is to lay waste to the place — never mind that it’s already pretty much a wasteland —, first slaughtering the population and then literally erasing the actual town from the map (or, at the very least, from Google Maps), leaving it as though nothing and nobody was ever even there at all — and that includes the villains themselves. To that purpose, “I have documents that prove we’re not here,” Michael says at one point. I’d really like to know what kind of documents those are and how exactly they work.

During that same conversation someone says that they never use modern firearms, only old ones. This is also never explained. My theory is that all the impossible technology they’ve used so far has eaten up the budget for fancy weapons.

One of the “hunters” complains that another killed a child; I guess their plan was to kill all the adults and leave the children to starve, or something. Needless to say, these aren’t the brightest bunch of killers. For example, they cut off the electricity in the town only to attack in broad daylight.

This ineptitude mirrors that of the filmmakers, who take a premise that could might conceivably weight as social commentary and turn it into a Brazilian version of Hard Target — or Perseguição Sem Tréguas, as they call it there.