On one level, you could take Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ “Bacurau” as a serious political work about the exploitation of rural communities, the callous indifference of government and the damaging role of America around the world.
Or you could forget about that stuff and take it as a garish, bloody shoot ’em up, an exercise in the Western genre where the wild west is actually northeast Brazil and the rising body count tends to obliterate whatever thoughtful points the film’s co-directors may be making.
In fact, “Bacurau” is all of those things at once. It makes points about community and exploitation, and then it splatters those points with blood, sets them to blasting sci-fi music and dares you to remember what those points were in the first place.