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The Settlers Is A Blood-Soaked Yarn Of Colonial Rapacity

In his debut film The Settlers, director Felipe Gálvez Haberle confronts Chile’s history head-on without glossing over the barbaric cruelty, writes Prahlad Srihari

“WOOL STAINED WITH BLOOD LOSES ALL VALUE,” Chilean government official Vicuña (Marcelo Alonso) tells Spanish businessman Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), ‘the King of White Gold’ who years earlier had bankrolled the massacre of the indigenous Selk’nam people in Tierra del Fuego to clear a safe route for his sheep. Vicuña’s words however are less a warning about accountability, more a rationalisation for sanitising the country’s grisly history. For he has been sent by the Chilean government to take control of the narrative, not to make Menéndez answer for his crimes. In his debut feature The Settlers, Felipe Gálvez Haberle unspools a blood-soaked yarn of colonial rapacity.

Settler colonialism, as practiced by the Europeans in the Americas, sought to violently replace more often than peacefully assimilate. Once the colonies became countries, the foundational violence was swept under the carpets of history so a whitewashed mythology could be implanted in the national memory. This is the story of Chile, the story of Argentina, the story of the US, the story of European colonialism. Gálvez Haberle implores his compatriots to overcome the hegemony of forgetting and acknowledge the sins that birthed their country, like Martin Scorsese did with Killers of the Flower Moon. Both films are anti-Westerns that take us on a haunting journey through early 20th-century history. Where Killers of the Flower Moon presents an epic saga of love and betrayal, The Settlers doesn’t fully reveal itself or its intentions until the very end.

The Settlers opens with a quote from Thomas More’s Utopia: “Your sheep...now...become so great devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.” The quote serves as an apt foreword to a world tyrannised by predators and mercenaries. Killers of the Flower Moon cast its white interlopers as the proverbial wolves in sheep’s clothing. The interlopers here don’t even bother with a disguise. “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” Yes, of course. In Chile of 1901, all the more easily, as native tribes are driven away from their own lands to make more space for white civilisation.

As a sheep farmer and land baron, Menéndez runs a tight ship. On his ranch, workers are essential as long as they are working; when injured, a worker is a liability better eliminated than kept on the payroll. It’s a cut-throat world where the summary liquidation of indigenous people can be outsourced to a Scottish soldier, a Texan cowboy and a Chilean mixed-race marksman. The Scotsman, Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley), once served in the British army as a private but now poses as a lieutenant. The Texan, Bill (Benjamin Westfall), is a braggart who can apparently “smell an Indian from miles away.” The Chilean, Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), is a half-Mapuche, half-Spanish scout hired for his sharpshooting skills.

Throughout the expedition across the forbidding stretches of the Chile-Argentina frontier, Alex and Bill bicker endlessly, their mutually beneficial partnership still charged with tensions from the outcome of the American Revolutionary War. Masculinity becomes an invariably violent showcase of power and superiority. Early into the expedition, Alex, Bill and Segundo come across a group of soldiers accompanying a surveyor who has been put in charge of determining the border lines between Chile and Argentina. The men pass the time engaging in arm wrestling matches, fist fights and other dick-measuring contests. On reaching the coast, the trio run into a camp of renegade British soldiers led by a deranged man (Sam Spruell) who has gone all Colonel Kurtz. The run-in will prove to be a harsh reality check for everyone involved in this lawless world. Opting for a 3:2 aspect ratio over 4:3 allows a little more space for the slow pans of the sparse and bloodied Patagonian landscape to shepherd viewers into post-colonial Chile’s heart of darkness.

The film is split into four chapters whose headings ("The King of White Gold", "Half Blood", "The Ends of the Earth", and "The Red Pig") are right out of a Western. But Gálvez Haberle uses these titles to expose the genre as an instrument for whitewashing history. Men like Alex and Bill here aren’t cast as mythic heroes, but as pathetic men with no moral compass. When Alex proudly recounts a time when he and his fellow soldiers had to eat a horse to survive, an appalled Bill asserts, “A man who rides never eats his horse. It is like eating a friend.” But neither of these grotesquely callous white men show any signs of humanity when native tribes are in their midst. At dawn under the cover of fog, they wipe out a Selk’nam camp of men, women and children as if it were target practice. The Settlers confronts Chile’s history head-on without glossing over the barbaric cruelty.

Caught in the middle of the conflict between the white settlers and the indigenous tribes is Segundo, an accomplice and a victim of an oppressive system. When Alex and Bill attack the Selk’nam camp, Segundo takes no part in the massacre, instead firing his gun in the air to give the impression of participation. But he can’t fight back against his oppressors either. Probing close-ups of Arancibia’s face reveal a torn Segundo forced to silently watch on, his gaze acting as an agonising punctuation of his powerlessness. Following the massacre, Alex and Bill take turns to rape a young woman who survives, before ordering Segundo to do the same. Segundo strangles her instead — an act of violence rooted in mercy that reveals the torment tearing apart his soul.

The final chapter flashes forward seven years, a time jump bridged by a rendition of 'All the Pretty Little Horses.' The lullaby, performed on piano by Menéndez’s daughter and sung by his granddaughters in his mansion in Punta Arenas, serves as a striking counterpoint to the violence of the preceding chapters. Moments later, Vicuña drops by with plans to clean up Chile’s bloody history for the sake of optics. “Our goal is the creation of a new nation, made by Chileans, settlers, and Indians,” says Vicuña. “Together, we must build this beautiful country. For this, peace is necessary.” Menéndez is adamant he did nothing wrong. In fact, he and his daughter insist whatever he did was for the good of the economy and the country.

Once Vicuña collects the required information to rewrite history, he visits Segundo, who has gone on to marry Kiepja (Mishell Guaña), the former Selk’nam translator for the deranged British colonel. If the first few chapters chronicle physical violence against the indigenous people, the last chapter chronicles cultural violence. Segundo and Kiepja are pressured by Vicuña into posing for a propaganda film about the supposedly peaceful relationship between the indigenous people and the settlers of Chile. The couple again have no choice but to yield to the demands of their new oppressors. When Vicuña has the couple drink tea like the Europeans, Kiepja refuses in an act of resistance. “Do you want to be part of this nation?” asks Vicuña, a question posed in the tone of a threat. Indeed, it is. As Kiepja gazes defiantly at the camera, the film cuts to archival images of 20th-century Chile, questioning how history is written, how reality is staged, and how the past is reduced to a selective reconstruction.

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