Lisandro Alonso’s Desolate Sublime

In three formally exacting, utterly entrancing films—Los Muertos, Jauja, and Eureka, which premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and screens at Metrograph as a week-long run—Buenos Aires-based Alonso has radically re-imagined and reinvigorated the classical Western. United by landscapes of melancholy beauty, disarming narrative experimentation, mesmeric and hypnagogic pacing, and a focus on solitary wanderers on missions with often obscure motives, Alonso’s dreamlike cinematic journeys—through the Amazon basin, the Dakota Badlands, and even 19th-century Denmark—are Westerns concerned less with Manifest Destiny than with manifesting mystery, trips into the undiscovered across a frontier that will not be subdued by the rationalizing forces of so-called civilization.