If we’ve learned anything from historical books and films such as “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” it’s that there is rarely an avenging angel, a righteous man or woman who comes and saves people in the middle of an indigenous genocide and gives the viewer a real life “Hollywood ending.”

In Canada and Australia, Africa, Central and South America and the American West it happened. It was condoned, sanctioned and endorsed, or at the very least tolerated by governments, communities and the clergy. Nobody rode in and saved them.

“The Settlers” is a genocidal story set in a place so forbidding it was nicknamed “Desolation Island,” its main city “Port Hunger” and that harbor “Useless Bay” — Tierra del Fuego. This film isn’t about ancient history. Events depicted here went on into the early 20th century. And “official” history didn’t want to acknowledge it, any more than the wealthy and powerful Catholic Church which, at best, turned a blind eye.

Writer/director Felipe Gálvez Habere treats this as a grim myth, an ugly “Odyssey” about men on a quest for a “safe” path to transport “white gold” — sheep — to the Atlantic on the huge island shared by Argentina and Chile. “Safe,” means territory free of sheep-eating Ona Indians. Making it “safe” means killing them.

This dark film about the ugliest tendencies of human nature under rapacious “colonial” capitalism is Chile’s bid to earn an Oscar nomination for the upcoming 96th Academy Awards. It deserves that recognition.

“Wool stained with blood loses all its value,” a politically-savvy sage notes at one point in this story. Reason enough for the still-young nation and its power-connected Church to be reluctant to stop this while it was happening, or condemn it when it started coming to light.

Inspired by true events and crimes commited by real villains named here, it’s about the desire of a rich landowner, José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) to find a path to get his vast herds of sheep to a port and then to market.

His “Lieutenant,” foreman and enforcer is Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley), a former British soldier who wears his Army red coat years after his service “in the war.” He’s a pitiless brute with “clean this island” orders.

An accident slices off a European laborer’s arm, and MacLennan shoots him, as he’s of no value. If this is how this racist treats “a white man,” we don’t have to guess how he treats the sheep-eating natives. They didn’t name him “Red Pig” for nothing.

He chooses the best shot among his fence crew to accompany him. That’s Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), whom Bill (Benjamin Westfall), the Texas “tracker” Don Jose also assigns to this mission, sizes up as “not white, not Indian,” although “halfbreed” never crosses his lips.

“You never know ‘who‘ they’re gonna shoot.”

They set off — the tippling, bullying Scotsman bickering with the “You’re doin’ everythin’ WRONG, Lieutenant!” Texan, who learned his trade hunting Apache, and the conflicted half-Native given a gun and expected join in the violence when ordered to.

For his debut feature — the film is in English and Spanish with subtitles — Gálvez structures his quest around three encounters — the first with an Argentine army surveying crew. Their surveyor scientist (Mariano Llinás) notes the “delicate features” and intelligence of the indigenous people and ponders the primitive governments, the winner-take-all capitalism of the rich and connected like Don Jose, of this and many other continents in 1901.

“These people, Mister MacLennan, should be taken to the university, to OXFORD, to make them engineers and lawyers!”

But even the “enlightened” surveyor and man of science insists his Native servant join him in his tent, and it is assumed, his bed.

Then there’s an odd party led by an English officer (Sam Spruell), a man one and all get a bad vibe about, but who will not hear of them refusing his hospitality. Something the Argentines said earlier lingers on the viewer’s mind.

“Nothing good happens when military (men) get bored.”

And later still, our hunting party spies a Native tribal group — women and children included. A third encounter will be the ugliest.

Stanley, Arancibia and Spruell are the stand-outs in the cast, with Arancibia letting us see the anguish and fret, at every point, as to how Segundo will respond to this latest threat, affront or crime against humanity.

Structurally, “The Settlers” is a bit cumbersome as it abandons that three-stop quest and we revisit the region and some of those involved in these events a few years later. In this informative history lesson part of the film, the “government” wants to meet survivors and perhaps hear their stories, or at least confirm their loyalty to a country about to celebrate its 100th birthday.

That plays as a theatrical and clumsy epilogue.

But it’s an engrossing story, even at its most gruesome or theatrical. For my money, it’s more satisfying, cinematic and exotic than the thematically and historically similar “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, rape, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Mark Stanley, Camilo Arancibia, Benjamin Westfall,
Mariano Llinás, Mishell Guaña, Alfredo Castro, Marcelo Alonso and Sam Spruell

Credits: Directed by Felipe Gálvez Habere, scripted by Antonia Girardi, Felipe Gálvez Haberle and Mariano Llinás. A Mubi release.

Running time: 1:40