Bacurau

 

A collective response in Bacurau

After writing that The Hunt was the umpteenth remake of The Most Dangerous Game, I watched another thinly veiled rehash of the same material, Juliano Dornelles and Kieber Mendonca Filho's Bacurau. The hunters in this one are evil gringos preying upon the inhabitants of an isolated village in the hinterlands of northern Brazil. The writer/directors do a good job sketching the inhabitants of the village who collectively band together to defeat the wicked Anglos. As social parable, Bacurau is thin gruel, but the large cast performs well and the film is beautifully shot. Bacurau's coffin imagery is a distinctive and peculiarly Brazilian touch. The film is a magically realistic palimpsest with the skeletal remains of an old action plot still visible.