The Settlers review – Leone-inspired western packs a venomous bite

A landowner in Tierra del Fuego sets three men to clear a ‘safe route’ through native lands in this menacing shakedown of colonialism and its revisionists

From its thunderous score, which sounds at times like someone dismantling an orchestra with a mallet, to the huge, intimidating, blood-red lettering of the intertitles, to the gut punch of an opening scene: violence, or the threat of it, lurks in every frame of Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s assured debut.

Opening in 1901 in the sprawling wilderness of Tierra del Fuego, Chile, this Spanish- and English-language film is partly based on true events – including multiple massacres of the indigenous Selk’nam people by white settlers – and explores a grim period in Chile’s colonial past that has subsequently been all but written out of the country’s history books.