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The marketing for this rarefied arthouse workout hypes the presence of movie star Viggo Mortensen (Green Book, A History of Violence) — but the Mortensen obsessives will feel they’ve been tricked, for he disappears after the first 20 minutes. He plays a grizzled 19th-century father, determined to rescue his runaway daughter from a near lawless town in the Wild West. And then suddenly, a visual sleight of hand shifts the focus from this black-and-white pastiche to a more realist, contemporary locale: an Indian reservation in South Dakota.
As we follow Native policewoman Alaina (Alaina Clifford) on a typical night shift, the grinding poverty, substance abuse and pervasive violence she observes start to feel as ineluctable as the weather. Alaina’s niece Sadie (Sadie LaPointe, heartbreaking) seeks relief from this endless cycle of despair. Her decisive act once again whisks the film off to a whole new period and place — the Amazonian rainforest in the 1970s, where jealousy and greed destabilise a small community.
Argentine director Lisandro Alonso stitches indigenous stories and experiences across centuries and continents to create a mystical mobius strip of a film. The ambition impresses, but viewers will need to be slow-cinema devotees to endure the minutes-long takes of people doing not very much at all — walking, sitting, driving, dying and so on. Moments where a massive, computer-generated jabiru — a South American stork that’s black and white and red through the middle — ambles across the screen provide peak thrills. The jabiru should have had top billing above Mortensen’s name.
★★★☆☆
In UK cinemas from February 16
