The New Cult Canon: 'Bacurau'

“I have documents that prove we are not here.” — Udo Kier, Bacurau

Call it coincidence, call it parallel thinking, but sometimes movies made at the same time in different hemispheres can harmonize together in film festivals or opening weekends or awards shows, and two of this year’s Best Picture nominees, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, felt uncannily in sync with each other. Here are two highly detailed thrillers about leftist agitators trying to survive a historical moment when they’re under siege by an ascendent authoritarian force, laying low until some future when the political winds inevitably shift. And the hopeful takeaway from both is the persistence of underground communities that are built to withstand such entreaties from the government. There’s a network in place, for example, to survive the federal siege on the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross in One Battle After Another, and an apartment complex in Recife, Brazil for a former academic (Wagner Moura) and other targets to lay low in the middle of a military dictatorship. 

It may not be a coincidence, however, that one of the most passed-around clips in One Battle After Another mirrors a moment from Mendonça’s previous feature, 2019’s Bacurau, which Anderson certainly had a chance to see before going into production. During the Baktan Cross section, where Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) has enlisted the help of his daughter’s karate sensei Sergio (Benecio Del Toro) to evade capture, the two part ways at one point by Bob screaming “¡Viva la revolución!” across a hallway as Sergio disappears through a trap door under a carpet. In Bacurau, another carpeted trap door in the local history museum allows a handful of citizens from a rural backwater to get the drop on the mercenaries who have invaded their town. The communities in both films have neither the money nor the technology to fight toe-to-toe with their adversaries, but they’re united and resourceful, and they’ve given plenty of thought on how to survive. 

Co-written and directed by Juliano Dornelles, the production designer on Mendonça’s previous films, Bacurau is certainly an exhilarating surprise from Mendonça, who steers what appears to be an evocative slice-of-life into a batshit genre thriller that samples from John Carpenter and Spandau Ballet. And yet it’s still completely of a piece with The Secret Agent and earlier films like Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, which all take place during different periods in his hometown of Recife, a coastal city in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. Mendonça’s talent for bringing dimension and vibrant life to his settings—through densely orchestrated soundscapes and location shooting, along with exquisitely curated needle-drops—boils down to his prevailing sense of community. Establishing the world of his movies as specifically as possible is always the primary goal for Mendonça, and the plotting tends to be a distant priority, behind sketching out the various characters and their basic situation, which isn’t the same as a story that propels the movie forward. He may hit the gas at some point, but he’ll take his sweet time doing it.