Bacurau Review: John Carpenter's excellent movie didn't actually make it

If imitation is the best form of flattery, John Carpenter's cheeks should now move to a "red" shade. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles & # 39; s new movie Bacurau Instantly a love letter to the horror maestro, a two-hour lesson in the riffing genre, and the excellent Carpenter movie Carpenter didn't really do.

Bacurau it is No doubt it was organized around the love of Carpenter's work. School in between BacurauThe central location, a hamlet of distant mountains that gives the film its title, offers a dedication to "João Carpenteiro." One of Carpenter's lost themes, "Night," plays on the syth-heavy soundtrack. Tribute movies often represent death rather than life in cinema – they can only be a re-enactment series that lowers its value over the years. But Philippe and Dornelles have style, talent, and purpose. There is an urgent focus on Brazilian filmmakers, and with it, a personal stake in the material. This is not an honor for the sake of honor, nor is it about John Carpenter. It's about Brazil, sertão

, and colonization. It's a modern job for Carpenter Attack on Precinct 13 -S smooth, important, and cracked.

The film starts off amazingly well. Bacurau has seen better days, before its mayor, Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima), filling up its electricity, forced the villagers to carry water. A local teacher, Plinio (Wilson Rabelo), has found that the city is no longer on some maps. The loss of Bacurau's principal Carmelita, who was sent to the afterlife in the first major action event, is another nightmare for the city. The only good news is that a UFO is not a UFO, it is only as good as the good news because BacurauIt's too short for. The bad news is that it's a drone controlled by a bunch of vicious hunters who consider human extortion the biggest game of all time. They are Brazilians in sports, and they have put the Bacurau people in their eyes.

Had Philipho and Dornelles chosen, they might have been in order Bacurau during a 70- or 80-minute run, they indulged in some form of siege, bleeding on the walls, and calling it a day. But the reason why the movie works so well is that they realize they've taken their time. They create a specific world, built on regional, political and social history. Viewing the film as an outdated and modern Brazilian sounds like watching a sharp, vengeful speech by, say, the Battle of the Canudos of 1896, but with a more satisfying effect.

Filho and Dornelles fully embrace the beauty of taking the time to tell a story well. The collections are interactive, evidenced by dangerous reptiles, and yet they make time for their audience to become familiar with their characters. Outside of Plinio, there is Teresa (Bárbara Colen), who returns home to the funeral to inform her grandmother Carmelita; Domingas (Sonia Braga), a regular local doctor, who arrived at the funeral and lay down and caused the incident; the ex-gangster Pacote (Thomas Aquino), a former man of origin, is always strong, but with a good heart; and Black Jr. (DJ Urso), who incorporates news stories into his speaker programs if he doesn't entertain a lot of YouTube videos in the city center.

Bacurau is a remote, isolated place, but the beauty of the film emphasizes the positive side of the trade. This is a beautiful world, and the people who live there know how to take care of themselves. When the bodies start to fill up (including children, that also includes a photo Attack on Precinct 13

& # 39; S area), those bodies are important. Philip and Dornelles do not write their abandoned characters as hopeless. They want viewers to remember the victims, no matter how much time or time they were given, because everyone in the film cares. When survival gets its necessary strength, the result is a reminder, not as the urgent release of the high conflict that Filho and Dornelles have built more firmly on BacurauNarrative, but as a note of resistance.

Sometimes, it is enough to criticize and intervene unwanted intruders out of town. Here, of course. The hunters, led by Michael (Udo Kier, who owned the ball), have their violence met with brutality twice, which sounds like a prototypically American idea, at least according to almost every American Western ever made. The explosive fury of BacurauSlow maturation is a satisfying benefit to the film's suspense, but without the deliberate steps taken to make the whole story count, it sounds silly. Firho and Dornelles & # 39; s repertoire of techniques, from segmentation to crane scanning (as opposed to the best advances they can make, given the Bacurau drawing) show the depth of their filmmaking. But their love for Carpenter, and their way of turning that love into a unique cinema for them, builds Bacurau light.

Bacurau opens in New York on March 6, with a national release to follow.