Josh Lewis’s review published on Letterboxd:
A completely bonkers movie that begins as a Brazilian social drama, observing the townspeople's cultural rituals and impoverished conditions at the hand of a corrupt mayor with an almost western-inflected sense of community. Beautiful desert and mountain vistas interrupted by small character interactions and location detail that carry a sense of local history as well as their procedures for everyday resistance. But then a shift occurs. There are a few off-kilter tonal and formal details that signal it; a split diopter here, a wild zoom there, but the shift is sudden nonetheless (if you don't want to know more I would suggest not reading further), and by the end, this has somehow transitioned into a full-blown spaghetti western splatter comedy version of like Assault on Precinct 13 about an impoverished community's armed resistance in the face of colonial genocide.
The exploitation creeps in so quickly and suddenly my brain is honestly still reeling. A number of people in the theater who registered the change got up and left immediately realizing that more tasteless humor and violence was forthcoming (they were right), but I think my colleague C.J. is spot on in his theory that the mode transition from foreign class drama to an American genre film (complete with exploding heads and John Carpenter needle drops btw!!) indicates a culture adapting and weaponizing the language of its oppressors.