It's a curious film that defies categorisation, opening quietly before descending into a cacophony of cathartic bloodletting by the chaotic finale.

I don't want to spoil a second of Bacurau, but it's one of the best filmic distillations of that impending 21st-century sense of doom, a concentrated vision of the apocalypse that somehow manages to strike a hopeful note.

Mendonça and Dornelles's film is... an attempt to grapple with unspeakable, horrifying evil -- but an evil that must be understood in social and historical rather than biblical terms.

The lesser you know about this completely bonkers, bloody movie about survival versus sadism the better.