This almost unbearably brutal and violent western drama-thriller from first-time feature director Felipe Gálvez Haberle was a prize winner at Cannes and Chile’s official entry for best international feature at the Academy Awards. At once explicit and yet mysterious and elliptical, it dramatically recreates some of the story behind the exploitation and colonisation of Tierra del Fuego by European commercial interests and the Santiago political establishment at the beginning of the 20th century. This involved the genocidal slaughter of Indigenous peoples by the now notorious businessman José Menéndez, a kind of Latin American oligarch who had been granted land rights for sheep farming, and used mercenaries to hunt and butcher Patagonian natives; these hired killers included ex-British Army soldier Alexander MacLennan, known as the “red pig”.
Chilean character actor Alfredo Castro plays the cold-eyed Menéndez, and Mark Stanley is the brutish MacLennan who still wears his red military tunic and affects the title “Lieutenant”. An ugly scene suggests that his capacity for violence, always substantial, escalated at least partly due to being brutalised himself. Haberle imagines an American “Indian-hunter” called Bill (Benjamin Westfall) who goes out with MacLennan on their murderous expeditionary adventure into the vast and forbidding southern wilderness and they have a tracker called Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), who is a “mestizo” – part indigenous – and resented by Bill who fears Segundo will turn on them.
