Fear Blood & Gold (2022)

Oscar Malle (Oliver Caspersen, also credited as writer and director) escapes someone we never see that's got him shackled in a barn somewhere in the continental U.S. of 1846. There's another man there as well, who tries to escape when Oscar frees him, but fails. This man, whose name is Santiago Robles, but who Oscar calls "Sancho Panza", deserted from the Mexican-American War, but then Oscar somehow took him as a slave.

(Santiago says he fought on both sides of the war, so I'm not sure which side he deserted from last.)

Oscar wants to travel to California to look for gold, so Santiago's coming with him. They find a cave with gold in the walls and floors, then spend a bunch of time dithering about how they're going to get it out without tipping someone off that it's there. An odd old man wanders in, figures out they've found gold, possibly cheats at cards to get brought into their little plan, then gets decapitated by Oscar. Oscar and Santiago walk to a trading outpost the old man mentioned, Oscar goes upstairs with a sex worker, and she shoots him in the head for his bounty (which I thought he said was $50.) Santiago carries on alone, and 40 years in the future has opened a bank named after Oscar, presumably using the gold in that cave to fund it.

I'd been thinking about what were going to be the best and worst movies I'd watched this year, as very early prep for the end of the year post. I'd been leaning towards The End as worst, but damn, did this movie blow it out of the water. What a mess.

Santiago clearly does not like being Oscar's slave, because he tries to escape as soon as Oscar uncuffs him, resulting in a very low-speed, silent chase over the hills and through the woods, with Oscar never shouting at him to stop or threatening to shoot him or anything. Santiago later puts something in the beans causing Oscar to hallucinate, shown with everything colored red or green, distorted voices and stretched out film, plus visions of tigers and some dark-haired woman Oscar later describes as having known earlier that may or may not have been a succubus. Setting aside whether Oscar, who admits to having only one year of schooling, even knows what a tiger looks like, Santiago doesn't try to kill Oscar or escape with all the gear and the guns.

(Later, Santiago openly offers Oscar a hallucinogenic mushroom, and Oscar accepts it! Santiago doesn't escape then, either.)

There's a lot of dreamlike imagery, blurred lines between reality and dream. Multiple scenes where Oscar peers through a spyglass, and while he says there's something to look at, all we ever see is trees. At best, there's one time with two blurry outlines of men on horses, who Oscar eventually shoots. When he fires his revolver, he holds it sideways, for no apparent reason. 

Oscar keeps drifting into memories of a young blonde woman he knew before all this, who died while they were mining in Missouri. If he and Santiago are walking along a rail line, Oscar may see a flash of her walking ahead of them and smiling back at him. For a while he says she'll be waiting for him in California, before admitting she's dead. I guess since he ends up dying in California, maybe she was waiting for him there. I assume the dark-haired prostitute that kills him is somehow related to the thing about the succubus, but by the time he and Santiago had that conversation I already deeply regretted watching this movie.

The old guy has a sort of a slow-motion Don Knotts air to him, but is still on the ball enough to see through the lies these two goobers try to spin. His main purpose seems to be telling them about the outpost, so Oscar can meet his eventual demise, but it feels like the momentum of the film (such as it is) grounds to a halt while these guys talk. I guess he's also there to highlight the difference between Oscar and Santiago. Oscar talks a lot - a lot - about ideas and ideals and whatever, but at the end of the day, he's just a small-time killer who does what he pleases and justifies it afterwards. The two men he shoots are dismissed as bandits. Are they? I don't know, we've only got his word on that. Might have been bounty hunters, might have been cowboys for a Spanish rancher trying to run off trespassers.

Santiago doesn't like the man, any more than he seems to like Oscar, but is either too scared or too, something, to kill either of them. It's hard for me to think he has a deep and abiding respect for life. He didn't help Oscar in the shootout with the "bandits", which Oscar suspected was an attempt to let Oscar be killed. Probably true; I think we're meant to read Santiago as smarter of the two, low bar that is to clear. He can actually read a bit, tricked Oscar with the poisoned beans, pretends for a long time not to know English without Oscar catching on, wears glasses when sitting around the campfire, which feels like coding for him being more intellectual. It could simply be Santiago figures if he's patient, the problem of Oscar will be solved for him, but I suppose it could be he doesn't want to kill anyone.

Either way, at least within this film, Santiago keeps him hands free of blood, if only by inaction, and Oscar doesn't. Oscar ends up dead, and Santiago ends up owning a bank.

Cripes, I feel like I'm talking myself into this film, which is not what I intended. It actually makes me angry, so, to be clear: The movie is dull for long stretches. Oscar is very annoying in his voice, his manner of speaking, everything. Santiago's actions require a lot of after the fact rationalization on my part to make sense. The hallucinations feel like an attempt to induce a psychological element better off implied or demonstrated through things Oscar actually did, rather than him getting drugged - I can't stress that enough, he lets himself be talking into being drugged, after already being tricked into it once - by Santiago and seeing things.