Eureka

Alonso’s hugely ambitious triptych explores the collision between Indigenous lives and colonisation.

Nineteenth-century Old West gunslinger Murphy (Viggo Mortensen), searching for his missing daughter, arrives in a lawless outpost, where the only justice to be found is by way of the gun. In the contemporary United States, Alaina (played by actual police officer Alaina Clifford) is a local cop at snowy South Dakota reservation Pine Ridge, who has her work cut out keeping an eye on colourful locals, crime at a casino and her disaffected teenage niece. Lastly, amid the Amazon gold rush of 1970s Brazil, two young men from a remote tribe fight over a girl – and one of them ends up dead.

Stitched together by the migratory flight of a jabiru and the shapeshifting presence of a character called El Coronel (Chiara Mastroianni), Alonso’s ambitious sixth feature is a triptych tripping through eclectic genres and varying aspect ratios. The film’s opening act reunites him with his Jauja stars in a gunslinging riff drawing from old-timey oaters, John Ford’s The Searchers (MIFF 1994) and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man; its second section feels like familiar Alonso minimalism steeped in Twin Peaks–style uncanniness and shot through with pop colour; while its third offers a subversive riff on ethnographic cinema. Throughout, Eureka’s thesis emerges: a commentary on the intersection of Indigenous cultures and colonial power across history, nations and modes of storytelling.

Content: Melbourne International Film Festival