This film is based on the true story of Antoine Tounens, a French lawyer and fortune-hunter, who as King Orélie-Antoine I claimed large parts of the southern tip of South America as his kingdom of Aracuanía and Patagonia – territories that had been defended so fiercely by the local Mapucha tribes that neither Chile nor Argentina had been able to permanently occupy them.

It is not entirely clear how much communication Tounens had with the Mapuche before his 1860 declaration, or how much they supported him afterwards. But it seems that some of them had hoped that by uniting under a European monarch they would represent a kind of state-like entity that other nations, especially in Europe, might feel able to communicate with, and maybe even form diplomatic relations or alliances with.

Rey is not a traditionally narrated film. It is a work of art emulating a fever-dream. A “normal” film would have suffered from the fact that so many things about Tounens’s story are either unknown, or uncertain, or otherwise in doubt. But this fever-dream allows the film to play with precisely these uncertainties – at times even telling the same events twice, from the memories of two different people, with two different perspectives and with differing “facts”.

Of course it would have been very nice to learn more about Tounens’s character and personality – but since any certain knowledge about these also seem to have been lost in the mists of time, any personality presented would have been a product of fantasy. So the film presents us Tounen at his 1862 treason trial in front of a Chilean court – with lots of his story being told in flashbacks. And since he is in ill health, and mildly disoriented, the flashbacks show his own uncertainty about what is fact and what is fiction. As aforementioned, this gives writer/director Niles Atallah the chance to incorporate the many uncertainties about the historic events into his film.

Since most of the film consists of dream-like sequences anyway, Atallah chose to have all the court scenes played by actors wearing papier-mâché masks of human faces; while the flashbacks are (mostly) played without those masks. That way a clear, guiding distinction is made between court scenes and flashbacks. Which is helpful in an arthouse film with many surreal, dreamlike sequences that can be a bit confusing; not to mention the fact that some of the dialogue spoken in the flashbacks actually belong into the court scenes, etc., blurring the timelines.

A lot of other artistic elements have directly to do with early film and film footage. There seems to be archival footage with film sequences that are at least 100 years old or more, showing various landscapes as well as a small rural town in Europe. There are feature film scenes from the 1920s and 1930s incorporated in some of the fever-dreams, and war footage that might be from the first world war, or possibly later. In addition, the film has lots of grainy specks and other imperfections artificially added, as well as scratched animation that looks like someone had deliberately scratched filmed footage frame by frame to achieve a certain “pop-art” effect. There are also “special effects” used that are deliberately made to look poorly in the same way that similar effects would look in a 105-year-old silent film, for example the smoke coming out of a volcano.

Atallah likes experiments, and on top of using digital cameras, real film was used in various forms (8, 16, and 35 mm). He and his editor Benjamin Mirguet then tortured the celluloid (reportedly, among other things, by burying it in the garden for a while) to see what kind of weathering and effects could be achieved. That may be one of the reasons why this film took seven years to make.

All these artistic elements work as alienation effects and highlight the dreamlike nature of the scenes. And it is meant to take us out of the 21st century and way back into the past. Archival film footage from the 1910s does have a similar look in quality to photographs from the 1870s, so the style fits in a way. And the hokey 1920s/1930s feature film scenes are representative of Tounens presumed fantasist tendencies. Finally, the war scenes represent the carnage that ensued in the region – for which there is probably little to no photographic evidence – when Chile and Argentina pushed into these territories. It is said that the indigenous population in the Chilean territories affected dropped by 95%. And the increasingly dark, increasingly surreal, and increasingly apocalyptic images towards the end of the film are also representative of that.

Some of the “art” scenes, however, do feel a bit like filler material, and I am sure that this film would have been just as effective in what it wanted to express if it had been 80 minutes long instead of 91. And given the sheer amount of experimental and artistic elements in this film, there is the undeniable danger that Rey will be looked upon as a demo-reel showcasing Atallah’s versatility rather than a film in its own right.

Some of the images seem to be inspired by Christian iconography, supported by the use of fitting music in some scenes. Betrayed by a Judas character in his very own promised land, Tounens – a king with no army and no entourage – becomes an almost Christ-like figure. An imprisoned and exiled messiah robbed of the opportunity to provide salvation for his people. And that might just be how a fantasist like Tounens may have seen himself.

The acting is very good, and the male lead actor Rodrigo Lisboa has to be commended for committing entirely to this role and communicating all of Atallah’s ideas. Apart from indigenous extras, the only other actor in this film is Claudio Riveros in a supporting role. All other roles are played by actors with papier-mâché masks who (with one exception) have barely any lines. Riveros, like Lisboa, nicely manages to play the same scenes twice with entirely different moods and personality traits, in accordance with the two different perspectives presented to the court.

The indigenous characters are mostly silent (wearing tribal masks); while others are given room to voice grievance to the gods without actually really interacting with Tounens. That way, the suffering of the natives is hinted at and becomes an underlying theme; while they are at the same time kept completely out of any active role in the story, which symbolises their historic marginalisation.

The cinematography by the well-known Benjamín Echazarreta is also very good, but there is often not much left of the original work given the many effects “inflicted” upon the footage afterwards. What you notice is that Rey makes far less use of “grand” landscape shots than Escape from Patagonia: while that latter film did put the vastness of the land at the centre of the story, Rey focuses on Tounens’s isolation, and the ever-shrinking world of the Mapuche, which required mostly narrow frames. Not to mention that for tonal reasons there is also lots of rain and mist in Rey.

As I said, Rey is not so much a narrative film, but more a work of art. It is worth watching, but you probably should be a battle-hardened arthouse fan to do so. I enjoyed some aspects of the film, and others I did not. But the film clearly has artistic merit, it is tonally consistent (unlike Zama), and Atallah seems to have achieved exactly what he set out to do, so I will overall rate this film at 5.5 out of 10.