General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Bacurau

Bacurau is a 2019 Brazilian-French feature film co-written and co-directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, set in a near future in which a small village in the Brazilian sertão (arid backcountry interior of northeastern Brazil) is erased from digital maps and besieged by foreign mercenaries.¹ The film mixes the Western, science fiction, and horror, and won the Jury Prize at the 72nd Festival de Cannes in 2019, shared with Ladj Ly's Les Misérables.²

Key fact	Detail
Directors and writers	Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, his longtime production designer, co-directing for the first time¹^•³
Production	Brazil and France, 2019, 132 minutes; produced by Cinemascópio Produções and Arte France Cinéma, with co-producers Globo Filmes, Canal Brasil, Telecine Productions, and Símio Filmes¹^•⁴
Principal cast	Sônia Braga as Domingas, Udo Kier as Michael, Bárbara Colen as Teresa, Thomas Aquino as Pacote, Silvero Pereira as Lunga⁴
Cannes award	Jury Prize (ex-aequo), 72nd Festival de Cannes, 25 May 2019²
Brazilian release	29 August 2019; about 700,000 Brazilian spectators⁵
Critical reception	93% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 169 reviews and 84% from audiences; a Metascore of 82 on Metacritic⁶^•⁷
Setting	A fictional one-street village in the arid sertão of northeastern Brazil, a few years from now¹^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot and premise

The story opens a few years from now. The village of Bacurau mourns its matriarch Carmelita, who lived to be 94. Days later, the inhabitants notice that their community has vanished from online maps and satellite imagery, and a UFO-shaped drone appears overhead.⁶ Mobile signal disappears, the water supply comes under pressure, and corpses begin to appear.³ A band of armed mercenaries led by Michael (Udo Kier) arrives and begins picking off inhabitants one by one; the townspeople eventually turn the tables and band together to defend their community.⁶

The village itself is portrayed as a tight-knit community standing firm against external threats, including a corrupt mayor who trades out-of-date food for votes.³ The directors describe the community as deliberately eclectic, made up of white, indigenous, and black residents, gay and trans people, doctors, teachers, and outlaws, and they cast many non-professional actors from nearby villages.⁹

Genre and influences

Critics consistently read the film as a weird western, a mode that mixes the Western with science fiction or horror, transplanted to the Brazilian backcountry.¹⁰ Screen Daily also notes a nod to the Brazilian cangaço (bandit) films of the 1950s and 1960s.⁸ Vanity Fair describes it as a mashup of American westerns and the politically engaged Brazilian cinema of the 1960s associated with Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos.¹¹

John Carpenter looms large among the references: the village school is named João Carpinteiro after him, and his electronic track "Night" scores one sinister scene.³ Mendonça Filho, a former film critic, has said the film's premise of western tourists hunting Brazilian villagers grew out of watching ethno-documentaries at a festival in 2009 and objecting to how they looked at "simple" people from faraway places; he summarized the film's reversal as "cowboys and Indians, except the cowboys are the Indians, and the Indians are the cowboys."⁹

Political reading

The near-future setting gives the film a science-fiction filter while it engages with contemporary Brazil. Reviewers connected it to the country's social divisions, the marginalization of the rural Northeast, and the government of Jair Bolsonaro, though the directors said the project predated the 2018 presidential election and had been in development for about a decade.³^•¹² Screen Daily called it "a capsule example of the economic colonisation of Brazil by the US and Europe, and of American cultural dominance."⁸ Scholarship has examined the film's engagement with white supremacy and resistance in the Brazilian Northeast, and the fictional village is based on a quilombo, a settlement formed by escaped African slaves.⁹^•¹³

Production and reception

The film premiered at Cannes on 15 May 2019, where its gala screening drew seven minutes of applause, and it competed for the Palme d'Or.¹⁴^•¹ The production credits state that it created about 800 jobs.¹⁵ It was released commercially in Brazil on 29 August 2019 and reached English-speaking markets in early 2020.⁵^•¹⁶

Reception was strongly positive in the aggregate. Rotten Tomatoes records a 93% Tomatometer across 169 reviews and an 84% audience score; Metacritic assigns a Metascore of 82, labeled "universal acclaim."⁶^•⁷ Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it a "sensational genre whatsit," and Vanity Fair's reviewer wrote that the film "doesn't merely reflect" the legacy of the American Western but "outdoes it."⁷ Some critics were more reserved: Sight and Sound's first-look review found the shifts in tone occasionally overloaded and the mercenary characters underwritten as a group, though it praised Udo Kier's performance.³

The film's standing has endured in Brazilian cinema. Mendonça Filho's later feature The Secret Agent (2025) returned him to Cannes, with retrospectives describing Bacurau as the film that won him the Jury Prize and marked his turn from social realism toward genre filmmaking.¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns, 1980 onward

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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