Eureka (2024)

Lisandro Alonso's latest feature is not for those with short attentions spans. A character in the second half of the film opines "Space, not time" (shortly before a young lady turns in to a bird) and this is very much the attitude that you need to apply to Eureka to assimilate and appreciate its meditational musings. The film is split into three (or four if you're being particularly picky) parts, beginning with an old fashioned black and white Western that fools you into thinking you're watching something much more conventional than what's about to unfurl over the next few hours. The opening (and shortest) portion stars Viggo Mortenson as a stranger who appears in a godforsaken crime ridden town in the old West looking for his daughter. Although this is probably the film at its strongest, it's not necessarily because it's easily the film's most linear and straightforward sequence; it's more due to a personal thrill of experiencing this sort of setting on the big screen. It reminded me that we have a sweeping, epic, two part Western to look forward to this summer in the form of Kevin Costner's Horizon- although this was the last sort of comparison to conventional film I had for at least two hours. After this superb opening, Eureka shifts into a slow burn no-wave experimental contemplation on the global condition of Indigenous peoples. We switch to full colour as Alonso introduces us to a Native American reservation in the contemporary U.S, where a police officer is about to set out for a night shift, saying goodbye to her niece Sadie, who will become a key part of the piece in the loosest terms possible. This middle section is laborious but never boring, experiencing the extremely mundane happenings of a night shift alongside Sadie's basketball coaching and her quiet thoughtfulness of increasing weariness of life itself. Sadie isn't necessarily depressed; it's almost as if she knows there's a better world out there, and this faintly resonates as she eventually asks her Grandfather to give her a potion that appears to change her soul into a large bird. The bird then flies through the aforementioned time and space to a Brazilian jungle in the seventies, where she witnesses the everyday life of what appears to be a religious community. This is where Eureka enters its final stretch and there's no change in style or tempo; by this point you either happily drink in the surroundings and relax, or I suppose get frustrated and leave (something you should never do of course). Thankfully for me I was fully sold on Eureka at this stage, and even though the film begins at point A and doesn't really go anywhere (despite its travels) it almost becomes poetic in its meditations, feeling almost like you're drifting calmly down a slow moving river witnessing random acts of brutal violence out of the corner of your eye from time to time. There were certainly moments when I was reminded of Ron Fricke's astonishing art pieces Baraka (1992) and latterly Samsara (2011) although there's no doubting that Fricke's walls of sound and fury are almost entirely absent here, understandably so. But Eureka will without doubt be one of the stranger films I see this year, and to have had the chance to see it in the cinema is something I'm particularly chuffed about. Alonso's film is something to be admired, and left me intrigued to search out his previous work. 7.8/10