‘Bury Your Dead’ LFF 2024 Review: Apocalypse and Ascension
Brazilian director Marco Dutra’s latest feature film, Bury Your Dead, fuses bewildering futuristic horror with biblical visions. The narrative is divided into seven stages documenting roadkill collector Edgar Wilson (played by Selton Mello) and his downward spiral as society collapses into anarchy. This cataclysmic progression begins backwards, launching into the seventh stage immediately, like a fatal countdown. Divided by bold red numbers, the chapters are blurred together by fragments of a laborious but monochrome existence, splintered by transcendental dreams that seem to allude to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: ascending to feverish heights. A neon nightmare of hellish doom, the inhabitants of this hopeless land attempt to maintain normalcy despite the crumbling of their social framework and the enigmatic pull of a religious cult.
Based on the 2019 novel written by Ana Paula Maia, the film avoids a precise definition of the end of the world. Instead, it focuses on its repercussions across the rural community of Abalurdes. Much of the film is centred around how humans react to uncertainty and pandemonium, rather than the events that have triggered the apocalypse. Fuzzy TV clips display reports of children detained on islands who have resorted to eating dogs, ravaged by a mysterious sickness. Beneath the slow rituals of everyday life, trepidation is building – resources are stretched precariously thin. Edgar, who previously worked at a slaughterhouse, endures a monotonous reality collecting roadkill to keep the roads clear, hurtling along remote roads that feel far removed from any sign of life. As the waste is ground down, he pulls a dead foal from the grinder and gazes at it bleakly: Abalurdes is not striving towards the restoration or rebirth of a new world, but simply easing the unavoidable march towards the end. Edgar’s sole companion, an excommunicated priest, performs last rites to those who are passing from one realm to the next – he is draped in clerical clothing despite his banishment, perhaps a last resort for the dying residents of this rustic hell. It is almost more unsettling to observe a warped depiction of daily routine, instead of a wave of mass hysteria and anarchy.
Edgar’s girlfriend Nete is absorbed by a mysterious cult at the behest of her elderly aunt, a following that seems to oscillate dangerously close to the supernatural. Clad in snow-white robes, their leaders exalt a tea that leads one to ascension. Tentacled creatures flash briefly before the audience’s eyes between dripping red orbs that appear to produce the mystifying tea. This element of the narrative is particularly phantasmal, like a drug-induced trip. Is the cult a representation of a coping mechanism adopted in times of extreme fear and violence, or is it a reflection of how religious fervour can be manipulated to control vulnerable individuals? Alternatively, or additionally, is Dutra introducing this aspect to allow the narrative to further descend into an unearthly, macabre cosmos?
The bleak shots that depict the Brazilian countryside transform empty fields into demonic lairs as the film progresses: the most memorable being a vast hill scattered with dead sheep beneath a swirling burgundy sky that rages and contorts. Dutra conjures up a weird and not-so-wonderful vision of his encroaching apocalypse in Bury Your Dead, and its brutal banality certainly leaves a pit in your stomach.
Edited by Humaira Valera, Co-Film & TV Editor
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