The arrival of merciless security officers shatters the peace in a remote colonial outpost in Ciro Guerra’s stately, horrific drama
The Colombian director Ciro Guerra (Embrace of the Serpent) seems interested in the processes by which the west colonised the rest, so it’s fitting that he has cast two big
Hollywood stars – Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson – in his latest, premiering ominously on the second to last day of the Venice film festival, when roughly a third of the press corps have decamped to
Toronto.
An adaptation of JM Coetzee’s 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians tells the story of a magistrate presiding over an unidentified colonial outpost in the middle of the desert, presumably in the first decades of the last century. Gentle-voiced and crinkly eyed and played by Mark Rylance, he sees his comfortable equanimity shattered by the arrival of state security officers. They’re led by Depp, who looks more like a skull wrapped in butcher’s paper every day. Evocatively photographed by Chris Menges in Morocco as well as
Italy, Guerra’s stately, frequently horrific fifth feature recalls both Kafka’s In the Penal Colony and Graham Greene, with Rylance as a sad sack powerless to stop the ruthlessly mechanical infliction of pain.