Guy Lodge Film Critic By the brazenly esoteric standards of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, his last feature “Jauja” was virtually a concession to the mainstream. A lushly shot 19th-century historical drama led by Viggo Mortensen, it was — until a typically disorienting coda — close to linear in its colonialist-quest narrative, even as it moved in slow, ever-widening circles, and duly became Alonso’s most widely released film to date. Nine years later (the longest gap yet in a career taken at his own pace), Alonso’s follow-up “Eureka” playfully appears to mock whatever tentative gestures “Jauja” made toward accessibility: A glisteningly opaque meditation on Indigenous living that refracts viewers’ interpretations as it repeatedly switches gear, focus, locus and story, it’s a film built to frustrate those who don’t succumb to its oneiric spell, not that it especially imparts its secrets to those who do.
