Bacurau is one of my favorite films of the 2020s so far, and it now feels like the perfect table-setter for Kleber Mendonça Filho to swing even bigger with The Secret Agent. It is the movie that put him on the radar in a real way, less because it announces itself as some capital-I Important international drama and more because it weaponizes genre as a communal rallying cry. You can feel the lineage of Neighboring Sounds in the way Mendonça Filho thinks about neighborhoods, class, and paranoia, but Bacurau (co-directed with Juliano Dornelles) has the hook and the bite that makes that worldview feel urgent and crowd-pleasing at the same time.
The film follows Teresa (Bárbara Colen) returning to her rural hometown of Bacurau for the funeral of her grandmother, a figure who has functioned as a matriarch for the community. Teresa reconnects with people who have stayed behind, including Pacote (Thomás Aquino), a former lover with a quiet competence that becomes important later. The early stretches are deceptively calm, almost hangout-like, with Mendonça Filho and Dornelles building out the town’s rhythms and personalities so that Bacurau feels like a real place with real relationships, not just a setting.
Then the reality starts shifting. Bacurau seems to vanish from digital maps. A saucer-like UFO drifts in the distance. Strangers in bright, performative outfits appear on the edges of town. The local mayor moves through like a parasite, more interested in control than care. The tension keeps rising, but the movie never plays its hand too early. It keeps re-framing what kind of story you think you’re watching, and that constant recalibration is a huge part of why it works.
Eventually, the threat clarifies into something even uglier: a predominantly white group of foreign hunters led by Michael (Udo Kier, excellent in one of his best late-career antagonist turns), treating the town like a game board. The exact mechanics of their “point system” and motives are left intentionally hazy, but the ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. The film does not need a monologue to explain the worldview. It is right there in the entitlement, the casual cruelty, and the way this violence is treated like recreation. Mendonça Filho is tuned into how fascism and corruption show up as an everyday sickness long before they arrive as open spectacle.
Two touchstones kept hitting me while watching it. One is John Carpenter, specifically the communal siege energy of Assault on Precinct 13 mixed with the unease and surreal imagery of Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness. The other, weirdly, is Star Wars, in the sense that Bacurau is packed with faces and side characters who feel like they could each carry their own story, but the movie is smart enough not to over-explain them. You want more, and you also appreciate not getting it. When Pacote goes to recruit a nearby group of fighters led by Lunga (Silvero Pereira), the film kicks into an even higher gear. Lunga’s arrival is instantly electric, and what follows in the third act is some of the most satisfying, crowd-rousing, violently cathartic payback filmmaking of the decade.
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What I admire most is how Bacurau stays entertaining without sanding down its politics. It is funny, strange, tense, and brutal, but it is never aimless. It uses influence without sliding into mimicry, and it never lets the story flatline. If The Secret Agent is Mendonça Filho capitalizing on an international platform, Bacurau is the proof of concept that he earned it.
Score: 9/10
Bacurau (2020)
- Cast: Bárbara Colen, Thomás Aquino, Silvero Pereira, Sônia Braga, Udo Kier, Thardelly Lima, Rubens Santos, Wilson Rabelo, Carlos Francisco
- Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano Dornelles
- Genre: Mystery, Thriller
- Runtime: 131 minutes
- Rated: NR
- Release Date: March 6, 2020
- Movies Like Bacurau: Snowpiercer, Civil War, Nope
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