BACURAU is a weird 2019 Brazilian film that I know my friend Charles recommended to me years ago. Udo Kier is in it, and his death reminded me to finally get around to seeing it. Only the next day did I realize that Kleber Mendonça Filho, who wrote and directed it with Juliano Dornelles, finally has a followup and it’s THE SECRET AGENT, which just came out and has been getting great reviews. So there’s another title added to my list to hopefully not take as long to get around to.

The title BACURAU refers to the setting, a fictional settlement in western Pernambuco. It’s “a few years from now” and things are pretty surreal. Protagonist Teresa (Bárbara Colen) has been away for some years, but she’s coming home for her grandmother’s funeral, riding in a water truck that runs over a bunch of empty coffins dumped on the road by a crash. Feels kinda poetic, but I don’t know what it would mean. Definitely ominous.

Her grandmother was clearly beloved, the celebration is enormous, but Grandma’s old friend Domingas (Sônia Braga, FROM DUSK TILL DAWN 3, THE FIRST OMEN) starts making a scene, yelling about her being a whore and a c-word until she gets dragged away. She’s all right, though. She’s just spirited.

Nothing’s very futuristic, or even modern, except for a spy drone that looks like a flying saucer that keeps buzzing around, and view screens in their beat up trucks that show propaganda about who’s wanted by the law. They’re after some guy named Lunga, but nobody’s gonna give him up. He seems respected around here.

One person who’s very much not respected is the mayor of the municipality, Tony Junior (Thardelly Lima). He comes in to campaign for re-election, bringing “supplies” including a dump truck full of beat up used books that he just pours into the middle of the dirt road. It seems to really bother him that everybody here hates him and hides from him, yelling out insults as he tries to speak to them over a bullhorn. They know he’s behind damming the river and limiting the amount of water they can get, an issue he claims is “very complex.” His speech is not well received.

Lots of weird shit has been happening around here – the drone, Bacurau disappearing from maps, cell phones not working, a horse stampede – but when the water truck shows up riddled with bullet holes, that seems major. And just then a pair of strangers on motorcycles drive into town. Everyone’s bothered that their faces are hidden under their helmets, but their garish biker outfits make some believe their story that they’re just dumb tourists from Rio. Believe it or not these dorks will turn scary.

For a while this doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily going anywhere, it’s just about the oddness of the place and time. Life is tough but the people seem pretty happy here. They care about each other. They have culture. They sing a pretty cool song in the funeral procession.

I enjoyed the music in this. It’s mostly Brazilian, but “Night,” a song from John Carpenter’s first Lost Themes album, plays on the blu-ray menu, in the middle of the movie and on the end credits. I guess that particular theme was found. It works well. There was another song I recognized and then I realized I just knew it from ONLY THE STRONG because it’s a traditional song they’re singing during a capoeira dance. They don’t use the martial art for combat in this movie, but showing the dance is a reminder of Brazil’s long history of inventive ways to stand up to oppressors.

This community has plenty of characters in the sense that Domingas is a character. There’s an old guy who gives out psychedelics. There’s another one who plays a guitar, follows around outsiders (specifically the biker couple) improvising songs about them, making them very uncomfortable. They feign appreciation and try to give him money to get rid of him but he won’t accept it. He’s in it for the fucking-with-them.

It will turn out (SPOILER) those bikers and the drone and some of the other shit are related, and are a serious threat to the community. About halfway through we meet Kier’s character Michael, a German-American leading a group of foreigners, mostly American, who are basically on a hunting expedition to benefit the people behind the water scheme. It’s kinda like HARD TARGET except instead of rich sickos paying money to hunt humans they’re just regular sickos willing to do it for work. Mercenary tourism, kinda. We’ve gotten to know the Portuguese-speaking people of Bacurau and then suddenly it switches to the perspective of this drone, and the radio voices of Americans talking blithely about them, it’s kind of a gut punch.

Kier is unsurprisingly perfect in the role, in his seventies but not at all diminished, using his powerful eyes at their deadliest setting. Michael seems to be in it for the sadism, the type of bastard who causes a bunch of death and then snipes at the guys who come into town to deliver the coffins. His crew need to watch themselves too. There’s truth to that – the people who do horrible shit together seem to end up doing it to each other. It’s their love language or whatever.

I also think there’s a truth, unfortunately, to this portrayal of the Ugly American. They’re not most of us, but they exist. There’s a couple who, after their first killing, excitedly shout “That was insane!” and then fuck right there in a field, flipping the bird to the drone watching them. There’s another guy, wearing Oakleys of course, who shares that after his divorce he went to kill his ex but she didn’t answer the door so he considered a few places for mass shootings but something told him not to do it and now he believes he was meant to do this. I forget if that’s the same guy who shoots a little boy and claims he thought he was an adult and his flashlight (in the dark!) was a gun. Like a cop would say.

In town you keep hearing about Lunga, the militant everybody stays mum about. Teresa’s man friend Acácio (Thomás Aquino) also has a legendary past of political violence that he seems to have left behind, but these fuckers wake him back up. He knows where to find Lunga, who turns out to be a guy with a crazy long mullet (that grows instantly?), crazier eyes, and a way with a machete. There’s definitely a parallel between Lunga and the American psychos but if the world is gonna be full of violence I guess you have to root for the one that’s gonna defend his people versus the invaders. I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to be a part of this but there’s cinematic catharsis to the morbid lengths Lunga and the townspeople go to repel Michael and company. Check out the difference in body language between Tony Junior and the Bacurauns afterwards.

Do you think he’ll cross them again? I like that they send him off with what the people of Barter Town would call “gulag,” while an emcee roasts him.

One detail I really like is how Bacurau has this little museum about their history, that everybody’s really proud of. They keep asking the bikers if they’re there to visit it. They probly should’ve. Would’ve seen that it was all about their history of rebellion. When one of the foreigners does finally enter the museum he’s just there looking for townspeople to shoot. He notices the wall full of nails and labels listing the antique guns that are no longer on display and presumably pointed at him. A very original “Oh shit it’s on” moment.

BACURAU kept making me think of Ari Aster’s EDDINGTON. Very different movies, but both pretty long neo-westerns that are also nightmare portraits of our shitty world, involve a politician, corruption, outsiders coming to commit a massacre, and both kind of swirl around for a while before boiling over into some intense violence. Also both have posters by the great painter Tony Stella. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an influence on EDDINGTON, but then again it could just be two filmmakers separately coming to the conclusion that a movie has to be kinda weird and crazy and undefinable if it wants to feel like the world we live in today. BACURAU achieves that.