Eureka Provides a Sprawling Examination of Indigeneity in the Americas

Lushly lensed and intensely cerebral, Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka is on par with the experimental Argentine director’s previous output. Granted, it’s now been exactly a decade since his last feature, Jauja, screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless, these two films feel inextricably linked: they both feature animal spirit guides, colonized landscapes and Viggo Mortensen as a frontiersman searching for a lost daughter. What sets Eureka apart, however, is its concerted focus on a broad Indigenous perspective. Instead of being relegated to the fringes, the film’s Native characters are consciously centered. As viewers exhaustively follow their daily routines, the lingering effects of imperialist violence across the Americas are deeply felt. 

Eureka unfolds with a Native singer belting a ritualistic reverie. While the translated lyrics to the song never appear on screen, it’s evident that the indomitable spirit of Indigenous Americans clearly reverberates, even if some of the film’s finer plot points aren’t neatly discernible. Divided into three separate yet interconnected narratives, Eureka then shifts to a sumptuous black-and-white section set in a lawless Western settlement on the U.S.-Mexico border circa 1870. Mortensen plays Murphy, a rugged sharpshooter on the hunt for the man who abducted his daughter. He seeks out El Coronel (Chiara Mastroianni), the woman ostensibly in charge of this anarchic town populated with murderous alcoholics, for intel on his target. 

Just when Murphy enters a tensely unexpected stand-off, it’s revealed that his 23-minute storyline has been playing on a retro television in an empty room. As opposed to the film solely dissecting tropes of the American Western, rife as it is with errant notions of Manifest Destiny, it radically expands in scope to observe how Indigenous communities have responded to centuries of rampant disenfranchisement. Eureka shifts its gaze onto modern-day South Dakota police officer Alaina (Alaina Clifford) and her niece Sadie (Sadie Lapointe), a basketball coach at a local high school. In both of their professions, they regularly encounter locals in crisis. Sadie politely admonishes a stranded French actress (also Mastroianni) who asks an insensitive question about the prevalence of adolescent suicides while Alaina responds to increasingly bleak, oft-domestic APBs. 

Substance abuse, child neglect and mental illness coalesce into an unrelenting stream of trauma-induced hardship. Yet even when confronting the bitter truth of Indigenous marginalization in the U.S., Alonso never veers into distasteful caricature. As Alaina encounters individuals at their worst, the duty she feels compelled to rise to is palpable. Conversely, Sadie yearns for a life far away from the reservation, a desire that transports us to the film’s final setting: the verdant Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Once again leaning into a sense of cinematic mysticism, this chapter ponders the divine power of dreams—digging into the subconscious weight of adversity, lust and the quotidian—in a manner that some may find comparatively erudite compared to the measured realism of the preceding segment. However, the meditative quality of this last stretch is poised to provoke more intentional interrogation of how Indigenous stories are created for consumption. 

While the middle portion of Eureka may seem the most rooted in contemporary Indigenous social strife, it also presents a forced assimilation of colonial ideals. While these elements are never overtly grappled with by Alonso or his co-writers (Martín Caamaño and Fabian Casas), it’s clear that Alaina’s role as an arbiter of “justice” is at odds with the needs of her community. In lieu of adequate resources in the realms of healthcare, education and mental health services, residents disproportionately turn to drugs, alcohol and physical harm as a means to escape. 

This echoes the depravity of the Wild West village that Murphy arrives in, though the comedic tone carried by that lot of boozers and gunslingers is, obviously, long gone. Even with the concerted presence of law enforcement (with Native officers serving the same reservations they live on), there is little recourse for individual dilemmas, even if they reflect a startling lack of social services. Alaina attempts to help those she can—drunk drivers who fake narcolepsy, children living in squalid drug dens and pregnant teens in the throes of a mental crisis—but she is just another pawn of colonization, upholding the order of a country that culled and battered Native populations for its own financial and expansionist gain. 

Though each narrative is carefully blended from one to the next, Eureka is best internalized as an immersive exploration of Indigenous identity in response to white supremacist subjugation. These sinister forces have manifested throughout the Americas since European colonizers first set foot on these shores, and they continue to target Native Americans as the far-right rises to power in the region. The concluding coda of Alonso’s enchanting film forces us to confront how imperialism has irrevocably altered every facet of human life: No matter how far we stray from society, capitalist greed still finds new ground to deplete resources from. Not only does the film successfully advocate for, and humanize, a populace that has been routinely silenced in popular culture, but it demonstrates that the destruction of these cultures has been emblematic of humanity’s extended downfall. 

Director: Lisandro Alonso
Writers: Lisandro Alonso, Martín Caamaño, Fabian Casas
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Chiara Mastroianni, Alaina Clifford, Sadie Lapointe 
Release Date: September 20, 2024

Natalia Keogan is a freelance writer and editor with a concerted focus on independent film. Her interviews and criticism have appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, Reverse Shot, Backstage Magazine, SlashFilm, Blood Knife and Daily Grindhouse, among others. She lives in Queens, New York with her large orange cat. Find her on Twitter @nataliakeogan