A 2019 Thriller With A 93% Rotten Tomatoes Score Might Be The Weirdest Western You Ever Watch

The Western isn't exactly at the height of its popularity in the 2020s, but 2019's "Bacurau" makes a compelling argument for its relevancy. The film's mashup of styles makes for a truly unique experience that's not only thrilling but also has a sharp satirical edge. What's more, the movie was a hit with critics, who gave the film a collective 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

In the 1970s, Roger Ebert gave a perfect score to "El Topo," a controversial and disturbing Western that, in the years since, has been similarly lauded by other critics. "El Topo" was credited with kicking off the so-called "Acid Western" genre, which combined tropes of classic Old West adventures with a surrealist style and counter-cultural spirit informed by the subversive artists that had been so influential in the 1960s. Alejandro Jodorowsky's inimitable film created a disorienting, surrealistic, psychedelic take on an American genre but, sadly, the same decade "El Topo" debuted also saw the death of the Western as a reliably popular genre. By the end of the '70s, the Western had been superseded by science fiction movies, and it's since been kept on life support by some truly outstanding revisionist efforts that have earned critical acclaim yet failed to restore the genre to its former glory. (Of course, Taylor Sheridan and his extensive slate of neo-Western TV shows might be just about to change all that.)

Still, we can at least say the Western has never truly gone away, which is a good thing because otherwise we might never have gotten "Bacurau." The surreal film from Brazilian writer/directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles defies easy explanation, blending social commentary with action genre thrills and evoking the spirit of previous weird Westerns like "El Topo" in the process.

"Bacurau" co-director Kleber Mendonça Filho's previous films, 2012's "Neighboring Sounds" and 2016's "Aquarius," both debuted to critical praise and, like "Bacurau," concerned themselves with modernity encroaching on the lives of ordinary people. For the latter film, however, Filho called the shots alongside Juliano Dornelles, who'd worked as an art director on both "Neighboring Sounds" and "Aquarius." Together, the duo drew on their experience of having grown up with Brazilian dramas alongside American films to create what is arguably the perfect distillation of their shared cultural experience. The result was "Bacurau," a brutal, one-of-a-kind near-future Western unlike anything either had ever produced.

The film makes no attempt to hide its anti-imperialist point-of-view, turning the residents of a small town into heroic resistance fighters battling the forces of modernity. But it's also not afraid to embrace the theatrical stylings of genre movies, which makes for a powerful social critique that's also a heck of a lot of fun.

"Bacurau" stars Sônia Braga as Domingas, an inhabitant of the small titular town in the Brazilian sertão. After the death of the town's matriarch, Carmelita (Lia de Itamaracá), Domingas and her fellow residents discover that Bacurau has disappeared from online maps. Things get even stranger when a UFO-like drone appears, cell phone service drops, and strangers are seen biking through town. Soon, these peculiar events take a startling, violent turn as armed mercenaries led by Udo Kier's Michael arrive to turf the Bacurauans out of their homes. But the gunmen didn't expect the resourceful townspeople to put up the kind of relentless fight that they eventually do.

"Bacurau" premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, winning the Jury Prize ahead of a theatrical release in its native Brazil and France that same year. Unfortunately, a planned United States release was scuppered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is a shame because "Bacurau" was one of the best international movies of its year, and critics absolutely loved it.

David Sims of The Atlantic dubbed the movie "one of the best filmic distillations of that impending 21st-century sense of doom" and "a concentrated vision of the apocalypse that somehow manages to strike a hopeful note." The Chicago Reader's Cody Corrall was similarly complimentary, writing, "It's a rallying cry against structural injustice told through a satisfying blend of Western and science fiction influences." The positive reviews just go on and on, and it's not just the so-called "top critics" that were won over by "Bacurau."

On Letterboxd, users have consistently rated the movie four stars or higher, with a minority rating "Bacurau" three to three-and-a-half stars. One review likens the film's tone to that of a Quentin Tarantino movie, while another describes it as "a patient and sprawling portrait of a Brazilian community as it struggles to defend itself against the dark specter of modernity" and "a gloriously demented (and lightly psychedelic) Western." In that way, some of the "El Topo" spirit can be found in "Bacarau," which is otherwise entirely its own thing. If that sounds appealing, the movie is available to rent from the usual digital platforms in the U.S.