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It’s been a while since Teresa (Bárbara Colen) has come home. Her return to Bacurau — a small Brazilian hamlet in western Pernambuco — has been prompted by the funeral of her grandmother and the town’s matriarch, Carmelita (Lia de Itamaracá). Her death at 94 is so deeply felt by this tight-knit community that it’s as if part of the landscape itself had been torn away.

Almost as quickly as Carmelita’s celebration of life ends, though, the town is besieged by sudden mystifying threat. Bacurau has vanished from online maps. Just after a pair of touring motorcyclists in Laffy Taffy-colored outfits pass through for drinks, all cell phone service evaporates. What appears to be a U.F.O. regularly roams the skies. And with worrying recurrence, the bodies of townspeople — kids included — are turning up, decidedly not killed by natural causes. Wooden coffins are having to be brought in by the truckful.

What exactly is happening will become somewhat clear during the back half of the movie. (Avoidant of exposition, Barcurau is generally enigmatic — it’s set during a vague “few years from now,” where a retinal scan can take the place of a written vote.)  But one can guess that the magnifying sense that someone or something is trying to somehow erase this community may have to do with the mayor of the Serra Verde municipality under which Bacurau sits. The corrupt, running-for-re-election politician Tony Junior (Thardelly Lima) has shown he isn’t so worried about this town’s survival: he’s responsible for damming the river that the Bacurau population had once relied on, and doesn’t seem interested in finding them an alternative. (Now Bacurau has to ship its water in by truck.) Citizens rightfully hurl obscenities at Tony Junior — it’s almost like a chorus — from the protection of their homes when he rolls into town one afternoon to dump used books at the school and drop off old food on the main street in an act of plasticky reelection-motivated goodwill. The gesture, though, feels more like a warning.  

Bacurau (2019) broadly reiterates a conceit familiar in the Western genre — that of a small town threatened by outside forces — and there isn’t any doubt that the film’s writers and directors, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, want us to have the kind of cathartic good time we’d have with another movie working with that premise. There’s humor to spare in the lead-up (a lot of it has an inside-jokeish quality, buttressing the “everybody knows everybody” energy of the area), and the finale is a blast of satisfying town-coming-together violence. The movie is finally an exemplary shoot-em-up; you know things are going to head somewhere in the direction of the classic exploitation-movie era when Udo Kier turns up as a bad guy in chief. (We get another confirmation of what the filmmakers are going for when, toward the end of the movie, one of John Carpenter’s songs off the soundtrack to 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13 

dresses up a main action set piece. I’d say they more than pull off the homage.)

Yet Filho and Dornelles seamlessly prop up fun without curtailing the very-real horrors of colonialism and political malfeasance their story evokes. The filmmakers make sure Bacurau isn’t solely defined by what’s imposed on it; it’s a Western where thrills and sensationalist style are certainly important but where inflicted ugliness and grave consequences don’t feel like they’re beginning and ending with a movie. When the shootout’s bloody mess has to be cleaned up at the film’s conclusion, the proprietress of the town’s museum — which had become a primary melee location — instructs some volunteers to clean the grime off the floors but not the walls. Moving forward always comes with an acute awareness of what you’re leaving behind.