Bacurau · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Somebody looks up and there's a flying saucer over the scrub.

Not a metaphor. A chrome dish borrowed from a 1958 B-picture, hanging above the dry hills of the Pernambuco sertão, whirring. It's a drone, and the people flying it are wealthy foreigners who have paid to hunt human beings for sport. They chose to do it from inside a piece of retro set dressing. That prop is the whole film compressed into one object: the newest instruments here, satellite mapping and severed cell signal and aerial surveillance, arrive wearing the costume of old pulp. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles are telling you that nothing about this hunt is new. It's a very old ritual that upgraded its hardware.

Deleuze has a small, useful word for an object like that. Most things in movies mean by habit: a gun means a shot is coming, a packed suitcase means someone is leaving. He calls that a mark, an object legible through its customary chain. A demark is the thing that breaks the chain, the anomaly that stops you anticipating and makes you read. The saucer is a demark of the highest order, because the anachronism is the argument. You can't file it under sci-fi and move on. You have to ask why the future looks like 1958, and the answer is colonial history.

The film also lets us fly it. Those high aerial views put us briefly in the hunters' seat, looking down at roofs and dirt, before the camera drops to the road and stays there with the people who live on it. Deleuze calls an image that foregrounds the act and angle of seeing a perception-image. Here the angle is the politics. Height is the enemy's position.

The inciting incident is administrative rather than violent. Bacurau finds it has vanished from digital maps. Water throttled, signal cut. Erasure first, then extermination, and the order matters, because you can only hunt people freely in a place that officially isn't there. Deleuze, writing about political cinema in Cinema 2, kept returning to a phrase: the people are missing. He meant that a modern political filmmaker can no longer speak on behalf of a unified people the way Eisenstein could, because that people doesn't yet exist as a collective subject, so the film's job becomes contributing to its invention. He found this most alive in third-world cinema, and one of his central cases was Glauber Rocha, who filmed this same sertão. Bacurau makes the phrase cartographic. The people are missing from the index. That literalization is why the lens earns its place rather than decorating the film: it turns a philosophical condition into a plot mechanism you watch happen on a phone screen.

The town's counter-move is a museum. A small room of relics from past massacres and past resistance, given the same weight as a set as the clinic or the school. Deleuze's word for what happens in there is fabulation: story-telling, legending, a community caught in the act of narrating itself into existence. Usually that sounds abstract. Here it has a floor plan and a lock, and it's where Bacurau keeps its account of everyone who came to kill it before, which is also where it keeps the weapons. History stored as ordnance. There's a modernist version of this move where a camera pans an emptied landscape while a voice recites a buried past. Bacurau's past isn't buried. It's inventoried, and it's loaded.

Which is why the first act moves so slowly. Eduardo Serrano's cutting stays almost ethnographic for a long stretch: the funeral of Carmelita at ninety-four, the school, the clinic, the brothel, Sônia Braga's Domingas grieving and drinking with terrifying authority. It plays like regional social realism and it's easy to mistake for table-setting. It isn't. Deleuze uses the word dividual for a collective rendered as a single affective unit, a body with many faces rather than a group of individuals with arcs. Pedro Sotero's wide 'scope compositions keep loading the frame with the town as an ensemble. By the time the hunters arrive we aren't tracking protagonists. We're tracking a body. When it's cut, we feel where.

The invaders are shot in another key entirely. Their camp is petty and competitive, bickering over who counts as properly foreign, and Udo Kier's Michael carries a mannered European chill that refuses to blend with the naturalism around it. Deleuze filed this under the impulse-image: a world where drives break through the social surface, appetite runs the show, and everything slides downhill. The hunt is dressed as sport. It's feeding. The decapitated heads they leave behind aren't tactics, they're symptoms.

Now the part worth arguing about. Deleuze split cinema into the movement-image, where someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the time-image, which begins when that circuit snaps and characters can only watch what they can no longer affect. He treated the second as the great postwar discovery, and film culture has quietly agreed ever since that the seer is more advanced than the agent. Bacurau re-arms the action-image on purpose, and does it in the landscape that art cinema has most often filmed as pure endurance. The architecture is the large form at full power: an encompassing situation closes on a milieu until a decisive act transforms it. Deleuze calls that encompasser a synsign, and here it's the sertão itself: one road, dry scrub, water cut off, signal gone, a milieu that produces the act it needs.

The better trick is that the town gets the small form. The small form runs the other way: an act discloses a situation you couldn't see. The villagers' readiness is withheld and then sprung, the hidden rooms, the weapons held in collective memory, the plant taken before the killing. Every act reveals that the situation was never the one the hunters mapped. They thought they were operating on empty space. They were standing in an armory.

None of this is invented from nothing, and the film says so out loud. The siege architecture comes from Assault on Precinct 13, down to the Carpenter synth pulse the score echoes. The engine, rich outsiders paying to stalk people as game, is The Most Dangerous Game, inverted so the kill belongs to the hunted. The choreography of the massacre, the squibs, the queasiness of watching a slaughter you wanted, is Peckinpah's from The Wild Bunch. The camera's grammar is Leone's: anamorphic width, long lenses flattening arid distance, the operatic zoom that isolates a face against emptiness. And under the imported genre sits the national ancestor, Rocha's cangaço and sertão myth in Black God, White Devil and the mythic reckoning of Antônio das Mortes, whose backlands-as-tribunal the museum rhymes with directly.

What that mixture did to filmmaking is specific. It proved that the most transportable grammar on earth, American genre, can be dismantled in a Recife production office and reassembled pointing the other way with no irony and no loss of pleasure. It proved a political film in 2019 didn't have to look like an essay or a portrait of victims; it could be built as an ambush, with the audience given forty patient minutes to love a place before anyone touches it. Cannes gave it the Jury Prize, and it came home to a funding environment openly hostile to exactly this kind of cinema.

Watch it again and give the first act your whole attention. The school, the clinic, the museum, the road. Then count how many of those rooms turn out to have a job in the defense. The question the film leaves open isn't whether Bacurau survives, you'll know that by the end. It's how long the town has been ready, and who else, somewhere off the map, already is.