LGM Film Club, Part 433: Bacurau
By 
Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s 2019 film Bacurau is an absolutely brilliant horror-western that is a very lightly disguised allegory for life under Bolsonaro. Set in the “very near future,” it is about a town way out in the sertão, the Brazilian outback. The first half hour is the town doing the things it does. A matriarch dies. Her granddaughter returns for the funeral. The great Sonia Braga is the town doctor who has a complex relationship with the matriarch, gets wasted and rants at the funeral. The granddaughter hooks up with a guy who is a slightly reformed gangster. It’s a rough place, but one where people survive the best they can. Who doesn’t help is the local Bolsonaro-type politician, who has cut the water off from the town and is clearly a corrupt piece of shit who everyone hates.
But then things get weird. The town disappears off the map. Cell phones go down. Then people start getting killed. And Udo Kier shows up as a German running a ranch where westerners can kill worthless people for fun.
Let’s just say it goes from there. There are more murders. And then the town starts fighting back. Big time. Do you like a lot of blood in your movies where very evil people receive their comeuppance? Because I know I do. And this is fucking great.
I keep lists of movies I’ve seen by year. Now, there are lots and lots of movies that try to have good politics but they aren’t good movies and thus are not worth watching. But my two favorite films I’ve seen from 2019 are now Parasite and Bacurau and they really go together as a pair very, very well. If you liked Parasite, you are going to groove on this. For that matter, just a tick below the quality of these two films is This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, by the Lesotho director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese about a widow dying and making future plans but a huge dam project is threatening her community. And then there’s Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s pretty great Birds of Passage, about indigenous people in Colombia who get into the marijuana trade and it how it changes their lives in great but also very not great ways. Not to mention Knives Out. So 2019 is a great year for political film around the world, if you put aside the bullshit YouTube videos and the doomscrolling online and surround yourself with some beauty.