By Andrew Montiveo.
Alonso has much to say with Eureka – about indigenous cultures, capitalism, history, and progress…. While the filmmaker seems intent on challenging his audience visually, this very challenge complicates his stated goal of amplifying indigenous voices.”
Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka (2023) is a film that resists easy categorization. Whether described as a “cinematic triptych” or an “elliptical meditation,” the most straightforward and accurate way to sum it up is as a work that defies conventional expectations around character, dialogue, and linear storytelling. It even subverts traditional concepts of space, time, and genre – beginning as a black-and-white Western set in the 1870s American Midwest and culminating in a full-color abstraction in the 1970s Amazon.
Such defiance of convention is a hallmark of Alonso’s filmography. The Argentine filmmaker’s debut feature, La Libertad (2001), follows the slow, methodical life of a solitary logger. It also launched a trilogy focused on isolated men, continuing with Los Muertos (2004) and concluding with Liverpool (2008). Beyond their loneliness, Alonso’s protagonists share a recurring trait: they are searchers. Both Los Muertos and Jauja (2014) revolve around fathers in search of long-lost daughters.
Eureka appears to follow a similar path. In a moment bordering on déjà vu, the film opens with Viggo Mortensen – who starred as the lead in Jauja – playing a cowboy in search of his abducted daughter in the Old West. His character, simply named “Murphy” in the credits, enters a town steeped in depravity, where unconscious harlots lie in horse dung, nuns revel drunkenly, and corpses rot in the open. Murphy ultimately finds his daughter, but she is no mere victim; she has become complicit with her abductor.
Before this plot fully develops, the film abruptly shifts. The viewer is pulled from a television screen into the “real” world – this time in modern-day South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, during an evening blizzard. This second chapter focuses on two Lakota women: a weary police officer working in an understaffed department and a contemplative young woman troubled by the decay around her.
While the first chapter boasts high contrast, striking visuals, and is reminiscent of Old Hollywood’s aesthetic grandeur, the second chapter embraces strict neorealism. The cast is made up of non-professional actors, whose unpolished performances lend a raw authenticity to the narrative. The frustrations and struggles they express feel deeply personal and real, further enhanced by the documentary-style camerawork, with unsteady frames, unlit exteriors, and extended takes reminiscent of Cops rather than Law & Order.
Alonso’s choice of Pine Ridge as the setting carries symbolic weight, as he has acknowledged in interviews. The reservation is home to Wounded Knee Creek, the site of a brutal 1890 massacre in which U.S. Army forces slaughtered hundreds of Lakota people. Historians often romanticize this event as the tragic conclusion to the American Indian Wars. In 1973, the site became a battleground once again during an armed standoff between federal agents and Lakota activists.
But Eureka offers no romanticized view of history or heroism. Its police officer protagonist doesn’t face Hollywood-style suspense or frontier justice; instead, her night is filled with mundane and dispiriting tasks – looking for a neglected child, mediating a domestic dispute, and apprehending a drunk driver. After investigating a shooting at a casino, she lingers in a hotel room, staring out at the snowstorm, her resignation palpable. It’s a poignant moment, a reflection of unrealized potential and a life constrained by circumstance.
The final chapter transports the viewer to the Brazilian rainforest in 1974, where a young man from an indigenous tribe struggles with the encroachment of modernization and the erosion of spiritual traditions. Frustrated by the complacency of his community, he embarks on a quest for the hollow promises of wealth and progress offered by the outside world.
It is in this final chapter that Eureka reaches its emotional and thematic peak, not through dramatic action or urban spectacle, but through the lush, teeming vitality of the jungle. The sounds of birdsong, the rippling of water, and the dense greenery stand in stark contrast to the industrial forces intruding upon them: trucks plowing through the forest, workers gouging the earth, and boats belching smoke along the river.
Alonso has much to say with Eureka – about indigenous cultures, capitalism, history, and progress. However, his deliberately disjointed narrative, the anonymity of his characters, and his oblique approach to storytelling make it difficult to distill his message. While Alonso seems intent on challenging his audience visually, this very challenge complicates his stated goal of amplifying indigenous voices. Perhaps a more fitting title for the film would have been Enigma.
Andrew Montiveo is a Los Angeles-based writer. He has contributed to Bright Lights Film Journal and Cineaste.