Settlers is a 2021 British science fiction thriller film written and directed by Wyatt Rockefeller.
Reza (Jonny Lee Miller) and Ilsa (Sofia Boutella) are refugees from an Earth That Used to Be Better, raising their nine year-old daughter Remmy (Brooklynn Prince) on a solitary Martian farm. Then raiders attack led by Jerry (Ismael Cruz Córdova), a former soldier who's come to take back the farm that used to belong to his parents. The subsequent conflict leaves Reza dead and Jerry the sole survivor of the raiders, so Jerry offers to take Reza's place in Remmy and Ilsa's family. Whether they can or should accept this is the Driving Question for the rest of the movie.
Not to be confused with The Settlers (2023).
This movie has the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Ilsa defends herself and her daughter with weapons multiple times. Her daughter Remmy also grows up to use them while defending herself too.
- The Aloner: For all they know, Jerry and Adult Remmy are the last people left alive on Mars. When Remmy has a gun pointed at him, Jerry points out that she needs him as much as he needs her. She disagrees and kills him. For a time afterwards Remmy does appear to lose it, as she stops bothering to clean up or maintain the farm and starts hallucinating, but she eventually pulls herself together, repairs Steve and sets forth to find out if there is anyone else on Mars.
- Attempted Rape: Jerry tries to rape Remmy after he ties her up, but her robot Steve saves her.
- Bathtub Bonding: Averted when Jerry builds a bathing pool; adult Remmy only enters it after he's left.
- BBC Quarry: Averted with the deserts of Nambia used to portray the harsh terrain of Mars.
- Break-In Threat: Things first start turning bad for Remmy when she gets up in the morning and finds someone has written LEAVE in mud on the windows.
- Burning the Ships: After using his breathing mask to save Remmy in the air lock tunnel after she nearly suffocates, Jerry burns all the breathing masks that the raiders had, showing his intention to stay but preventing anyone else from leaving also. He doesn't respond well to discovering that adult Remmy has a mask she's been hiding from him.
- Chained to a Bed: Remmy starts to freak out when she wakes up from being knocked unconscious to find that Jerry has tied her to her bunk. He pleads that it's just to force her to listen to him, but he eventually tries to rape her.
- Companion Cube: A literal version with the mining robot that Remmy befriends as it's a metal box on legs. As Remmy wants to interact with Jerry as little as possible, she dubs the robot "Steve" and it becomes her Robot Buddy. Which saves her when Jerry tries to rape her and Steve shoots him with its seismic gun. In the end Remmy repairs Steve and leaves it to run the farm while she goes out into the world.
- Damsel in Distress: Remmy is Chained to a Bed by Jerry. She's saved from his Attempted Rape by her robot friend Steve.
- Dark Action Girl: The female raider in Jerry's band attacks along with them wielding a rifle.
- Door-Closes Ending: Remmy decides to leave the farm and find out if there's anyone else alive on Mars. She walks through the airlock tunnel and finds herself looking out over an empty desert, then turns to look as the airlock door closes behind her. Cut to credits.
- Due to the Dead: Isla asks Jerry to bury her husband which he does, building a cairn of rocks on the ridge. The other raiders are also buried there. After Remmy kills Jerry, she buries him under a cairn with the others.
- Forgiven, but Not Forgotten: Adult Remmy doesn't try to avenge her parents but still gives Jerry the cold shoulder and refuses to have a child with him.
- Great Offscreen War: We get minimal information on the war that Jerry fought in. It's implied to be a conflict between Earth and Mars (or an Earth conflict that spilled over onto Mars) because Isla mentions their spacecraft being shot down when it tried to land, and Jerry's father trying to force them to leave once he realised they were from Earth. According to Jerry the war has degenerated into a fight over whatever scraps are left.
- Grey-and-Grey Morality: Neither side is completely untarnished. Jerry is seeking to get the farm from Reza and Ilsa with violence. However, it turns out they stole the place, and killed his father to do this. Later he tries to live somewhat peacefully with Ilsa and Remmy. Ilsa tries to kill him, and he kills her defending himself. Then he tries to make Remmy his wife, with Attempted Rape when she won't do it. She has to kill him in self-defense.
- In the Future, We Still Have Roombas: Ilsa is surprised when she's unloading boxes and one of them sprouts legs and runs off. It's a mining robot that her daughter decides to call "Steve".
- It Works Better with Bullets: Jerry locks up every weapon in the place after Ilsa tries to stab him, but asks for thirty days to prove his good intentions; after that, he will leave his gun behind so she has a chance to shoot him. He does keep his promise but the gun isn't loaded. Jerry doesn't want to harm her, but Ilsa—feeling guilty over Remmy's hostile reaction to her mother sleeping with the man who killed her father—makes a run for a knife that's been left on the kitchen counter and it's implied she dies during the subsequent struggle over the knife. After the Time Skip, Jerry hands Remmy his pistol so she can put down one of the pigs. It turns out to be loaded, showing that they trust each other to a certain extent—Remmy only shoots him after this trust is violated.
- Killed Offscreen: Ilsa is killed while trying to kill Jerry inside the house. This isn't shown, with the next shot being him building a cairn over her body outside.
- Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Ilsa and Jerry have sex (offscreen) in the greenhouse after he comes onto her.
- Mama Bear: Ilsa stabs to death a female raider who's trying to capture her daughter. She later tells Jerry that she killed his father after he tried to force her, while pregnant with Remmy, to leave the protective dome, and threatens to kill him if he tries to harm Remmy. Jerry scoffs at the idea that he would do so.
- Not So Stoic:
- As an adult Remmy keeps her distance from Jerry and barely speaks to him, but when Jerry shows Remmy a drawing he made of her mother, she breaks down and cries in his arms. Unfortunately Jerry takes advantage of the situation to kiss her, only for Remmy to flee him and the simmering conflict between them starts coming out into the open.
- Jerry sticks to his promise not to harm Remmy for years, but starts to lose it when he finds Remmy's breathing mask and realises she's planning to leave the farm which would leave him all alone.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: When Remmy asks why Jerry doesn't just rape her, he says she'd prefer that as she could then see him as the villain. Ironically he's right; Jerry does try to rape her and as a result Remmy finds it a lot easier to kill him.
- Replacement Goldfish: After some threats and an attempt to kill Jerry, Ilsa eventually accepts his advances because really, what choice does she have? Remmy however is not willing to understand her mother's position.
- Returning War Vet: Jerry is a veteran returning to the farm that he grew up in. He doesn't seem to have any affection for his parents as he's not bothered by the implication that Isla and Reza may have killed them in order to take the farm for themselves, but makes it clear that he's not leaving as it's the only safe haven on Mars that he knows of.
- Romancing the Widow: Played for Drama as Jerry has not only killed Ilsa's husband, but it's implied that the woman Ilsa stabbed to death was Jerry's love interest. While Jerry and Isla are willing to accept the situation and make a life together, Remmy is not.
- Sexy Discretion Shot: Ilsa and Jerry have sex in the greenhouse together, though they're only seen when making out beforehand.
- Sound-Only Death: Reza goes out at night to kill the last raider. Ilsa and Remmy hear a gunshot, but it's Jerry who turns up in their house. Isla's death is shown from Remmy's perspective as she runs to grab the kitchen knife and Jerry pursues her. Remmy hears the sound of her mother's last gasp and then we cut to her watching Jerry build a cairn for her.
- Space Western: Though borrowing from the Determined Homesteader trope than cowboys with rayguns.
- Time-Shifted Actor: Brooklynn Pierce plays Remmy as a preteen girl. Later Nell Tiger Free plays her as a young woman.
- Time Skip: The third act cuts to Remmy grown to adulthood.
- The Wall Around the World: Remmy doesn't understand why they don't just run away from Jerry while he's occupied. She discovers why when she decides to run away herself only to find the farm is covered by a protective dome. Jerry, who grew up on the farm, says he was eight before his parents told him about it. Turns out there was a terraforming project on Mars, explaining how you can walk on the surface without a spacesuit, but the war has put an end to that. The atmosphere is escaping out into space, duststorms cover the planet and any settlement out in the open is doomed. It becomes a source of tension between them when Jerry discovers Remmy is planning to leave, as he regards it as suicide and a sign of her failure to face reality and settle down with him.
- Wife Husbandry: Jerry doesn't touch Remmy while she's young, but once she grows up he wants to start a family with her. Remmy however threatens to abort any child she has with him.
- Why Did You Make Me Hit You?: Jerry says this after Remmy tries to run away and he accidentally injures Remmy trying stop her, blaming Remmy and her mother for what happened to them.