In the near future, the people of Bacurau, a small, impoverished rural community in the fictional Serra Verde municipality of western Pernambuco, gather for the funeral of Dona Carmelita, the elderly woman seen as the town’s matriarch and the steady heartbeat of every local story. Her granddaughter Teresa, now a young woman, returns after many years not only to mourn but also to bring much-needed medicine, stirring old memories and hinting at unspoken tensions beneath the town’s quiet surface.
In the days that follow, a string of perplexing and unsettling events unsettles the villagers. Bacurau begins to vanish from online maps and satellite images, its once-visible roads and landmarks erasing as if secrecy itself had decided to hide the place. Mobile signals drop away, and a drone shaped like a UFO is spotted drifting above the hills. Through the turmoil, an unnamed couple from southern Brazil passes through on motorcycles, an ominous sign of the wider forces circling the town.
At the heart of Bacurau’s trouble is a bitter dispute over water rights from the local river. Upstream, water is dammed in a crooked scheme masterminded by the town’s wealthy mayor, Tony Junior. He visits Bacurau during an election season, offering old food and worn books in a hollow bid to buy votes while withholding water, forcing the residents to hide and wait for a break that never seems to come. A tanker truck of water finally arrives, but it has been riddled with bullets, a brutal reminder that every resource now comes with a price.
Trouble intensifies when horses stampede through the town and two local men are sent to investigate a nearby farm, where they discover the family who owned it has been murdered. As the investigators attempt to leave, they too are killed by a group of southern motorcyclists. The story takes an even more unsettling turn when this pair encounters a group of mostly American foreigners led by Michael. The foreigners chastise the dead men’s family for “losing” their chance to earn points, and the tension among the outsiders grows louder as they follow a strict, almost gamelike logic for violence.
After receiving silent directions through earpieces, the foreigners kill the couple and then argue over who earned the points for their deaths. The hunt shifts toward Bacurau’s residents, who transform fear into resolve and begin to organize a defense. Pacote, Teresa’s former lover, seeks out Lunga, a revolutionary protected by the townspeople, and he persuades him to join the fight against the outsiders. As the local resistance gains momentum, Bacurau’s people arm themselves, determined to defend their land and their way of life.
The battle unfolds with brutal costs: the foreigners kill a nine-year-old boy and plunge the town into darkness by severing electricity. Yet the tide begins to turn as the locals press back, carefully coordinated and fiercely determined to reclaim their freedom. By dawn, the invaders are gradually overpowered and killed, with the notable exception of Michael, who is captured and held.
When Tony Junior arrives with a luxury minibus to collect the surviving foreigners, he is confronted with the stark truth of Bacurau’s resilience. He denies any knowledge of the outsiders until Michael yells for help, exposing the mayor’s complacent complicity. The confrontation ends with a grim consequence: the mayor is sent away to die in the desert, half-naked and tied to a donkey, while Michael is buried alive in an underground cell, shouting a defiant warning to a world that has just begun to pay attention.
This world, where water, power, and memory collide, remains a study in communal solidarity and moral courage. It is a narrative that blends rural grief with sudden violence and a collective refusal to surrender to exploitation, all told with a patient, observational lens that invites viewers to ponder fate, resistance, and the cost of standing up to those who would profit from others’ suffering. > "this is only the beginning."
