Jauja

Jauja (2014) is Lisandro Alonso's hypnotic drama-western, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Viggo Mortensen plays Gunnar Dinesen, a Danish engineer who has dragged his teenage daughter to the edge of 19th-century Patagonia, where a small military unit camps in the scrub.

The girl slips away with a young soldier. Her father saddles up and rides into the rocky wilderness after her — and the further he goes, the less the land obeys ordinary rules of time and place. Alonso shoots in long, still takes and a boxy old aspect ratio with rounded corners, almost no score, letting the desert swallow the plot whole. The search for a daughter quietly turns into something far stranger.

The film took the FIPRESCI Prize in Cannes' Un Certain Regard, and Mortensen composed the spare guitar music himself. This is slow cinema for patient viewers — a movie that prefers riddles to answers and rewards anyone willing to sit inside its trance. Stream Jauja (2014) online on iFILM.