Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja opens in the middle of the Patagonian desert where we meet Danish Captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) and his daughter Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger) who are traveling towards a destination unknown to us. Ingeborg has started attracting the attention of the local soldiers who talk to her father about ways of courting her which include invitations to a ball and giving her a horse. Dinesen, perhaps still getting used to the local customs, seems to be little affected or bothered by these insinuations, and in broken Spanish thanks the men for their compliments to his daughter. Little does he know that Ingeborg has already set her eyes on a man of her own, who one night takes her away with him, the two of them galloping away into the vast desert.

Shot in gorgeous Academy ratio, Jauja takes on the otherworldly look of a vintage photograph through exquisite color saturation and very specific framing that makes it seem as if the desert had been waiting there just to pose for Alonso’s camera. Evoking the plot of The Searchers and the one man against the world theme of Aguirre the Wrath of God and filtering them through what seems to be a peyote-laced worldview, Jauja is an existential comedy of the highest order. It’s impossible not to chuckle at Gunnar’s arrogance as he comes to think that he will be able to take on whatever awaits him in the desert. An allegory for colonialism perhaps? Who knows? Alonso is completely uninterested in digesting the film’s meaning for his audience and instead works towards something that becomes more insular and dreamlike with every passing minute.

And honestly, spending your time trying to find a meaning in the film is a waste of time, when you could be indulging in the intoxicating beauty captured by the camera, not to mention Alonso’s exceptional use of wordplay to highlight the film’s oneiric qualities. By the time Gunnar runs into an engineer called Malaspina (almost equivalent to the Spanish word for “bad feeling”) you know that his search will be useless, he has been lost since before we even met him. Jauja is a film about the perils of losing oneself in too much confidence, it invites us to get lost within it and has little to offer for those unwilling to gallop into the night with its characters.