Eureka review – Lisandro Alonso’s meditation on Indigenous life is striking but slow | Drama films

What starts as a pastiche of a classic western – Viggo Mortensen stars as a stranger in a hostile frontier town – takes a sudden swerve into the unexpected when the story baton is passed to a put-upon present-day female cop working a night shift in a Native American reservation. Then, through a magical realist flourish featuring a large bird, the location switches again, this time to the Brazilian jungle some time in the past.

This shape-shifting picture from experimental Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso is a formally inventive exercise, one that weaves together meditations on Indigenous peoples and the spectre of colonialism in a form unlike anything you will have seen before. Unfortunately, for all its daring, Eureka is often stultifyingly slow. An interminable static shot of someone sitting glumly in a corridor lasts so long that time slows down, life loses all meaning and, one by one, your brain synapses start to atrophy.

What starts as a pastiche of a classic western – Viggo Mortensen stars as a stranger in a hostile frontier town – takes a sudden swerve into the unexpected when the story baton is passed to a put-upon present-day female cop working a night shift in a Native American reservation. Then, through a magical realist flourish featuring a large bird, the location switches again, this time to the Brazilian jungle some time in the past.

This shape-shifting picture from experimental Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso is a formally inventive exercise, one that weaves together meditations on Indigenous peoples and the spectre of colonialism in a form unlike anything you will have seen before. Unfortunately, for all its daring, Eureka is often stultifyingly slow. An interminable static shot of someone sitting glumly in a corridor lasts so long that time slows down, life loses all meaning and, one by one, your brain synapses start to atrophy.