Opens with a woman returning to town to a mixed welcome just in time for a funeral featuring some light hostility – but you can tell from the Star Wars scene wipes that this is picking up where Aquarius left off, and is gonna be a good time. Not TOO good of a time – I was disappointed when the flying saucer a half-hour in just turned out to be a drone… but the drone turned out to be operated by a group of American hunters descending on Bacurau because the mayor has sold out the townspeople as wild game.
The town pulls together pretty quickly, unlike the hunters, who turn on each other whenever things go wrong. You’d think the mayor would know this, but Bacurau features at least two notorious killers, a history of violent revolution, a museum full of vintage defensive weapons, and (I’m not sure how this is related) a love for psychedelic drugs.
When two hunters pause mid-action to fuck, I’m pretty sure it’s a Cannibal Holocaust reference. Movie’s logic has an Udo Kier-shaped hole in it. After insisting that he’s more American than the Americans, he acts like they’re going on a rescue mission for the missing advance couple, then shoots one of his own guys after taking random potshots at main street, then almost kills himself, then whines like a baby at the town mayor, then says something like “we’ve killed more people than you know”, but his group was acting like they just met for this mission, then some “you haven’t heard the last of us” line as he’s being buried alive under the city. Wonder if they didn’t give him a script, and just let him make any decision he chose. I’ve been bummed out lately by some overwritten movies with predictable story arcs, so I’m not sure this is a complaint. Cinema Scope on the movie’s weirdness, not specifically on Udo Kier:
If Bacurau is a genre film, it’s one whose tension relies most on the fact that genre can no longer be relied upon. The unpredictability of these genre shifts is only amplified by the same reversals in tone or perspective already discernible from the beginning, which become increasingly jarring as the film progresses, producing an off-kilter, anything-goes atmosphere that is still careful to stop just short of the incoherent or the arbitrary.
The town doctor is Sônia Braga, lead of Aquarius, and the woman returning to town in the beginning was also in Aquarius playing Sônia’s character in flashbacks. The hunter who gets shot by Udo for calling him a nazi was in Support the Girls. Udo Kier is of course best known for Puppet Master 12: The Littlest Reich.