Sayen

When an evil Corporation threatens to steal her people's ancestral lands, hiring a group of vicious mercenaries to run them all off, Sayen’s grandmother is murdered. Sayen must use her traditional training as a warrior, as well as her knowledge of the jungle, to hunt those men down and get her revenge.

Sayen is a young Mapuche woman who must defend her lands from an evil multi-national corporation looking to mine the Cobalt under their feet, an essential mineral used in batteries for electric cars, computers, and cell phones. Her hunt for revenge ultimately unravels a conspiracy between the government and the corporation to destroy the Chilean wilderness in order to exploit its resources.

It’s a Chilean First Blood, but with a message.

The big marketing push behind Sayen is that it claims to explore the Mapuche conflict in southern Chile. The film is apparently a big deal in Chile, touted as being one of their first big “Hollywood” productions, with a Chilean production company partnering with Amazon Studios. It’s apparently a pretty big deal, locally at least. The film is even directed by Chilean-born cinematographer Alexander Witt, a big name on the local scene as he was a unit director on Infinity Wars. This film is intended as the first in a trilogy, which explains why it just kind of ends with a handful of plot points unresolved.

And it’s… not bad, but it’s also pretty clunky.

While Sayen is definitely intended as a movie with a message—which is what I think is attracting a lot of people outside of Chile who are checking it out—the reason a lot of those same people are leaving the film feeling disappointed is that, in the end, it’s really just nothing more than a regular old run-of-the-mill action movie. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s the truth. Think First Blood. Think The Emerald Forest. Think The Hunted. That’s really all Sayen is.

But not as good.

What is good, however, is how amazing the film looks. Chile is absolutely gorgeous, both as the setting of the individual scenes and also in the incredible sweeping vistas, and the film never misses a chance to show that off. Additionally, the main character of Sayen is played by Rallen Montenegro, who was found in an open casting call, and she is fantastic. The film itself didn’t really wow me, but I’d definitely be interested in seeing her in more things. There were also a lot of Chilean hip hop artists in the soundtrack too, so that was pretty cool.

What I’m “Sayen” here is… Sayen is good, but not great.