I was not surprised that Settlers was poorly reviewed on IMDB.

It’s told mostly from the perspective of girls and women, it is one of the bleakest movies I’ve ever seen, and it doesn’t offer any hope at the end, really. It’s not a comfortable or comforting movie, and to be fair it’s not completely successful in the entirety of its aspirations. It had plenty of guts, but perhaps needed more meat.

That said, Settlers gives very little to the viewer and demands quite a lot. Those kind of movies never achieve high ratings. It’s uncompromising, and you have to understand as much about what it’s not doing as what it is doing to make sense of it. The film is about what people do when they have no choices, what delusions they then choose to allow them to continue, what decisions they make in the face of no decision actually really mattering one way or another. Perhaps they never matter even in this world, but in the world of the movie they definitely do not.

Don’t let the sf setting fool you: this is an art house type film and must be read as such (another reason for all the bad reviews). The entire cast was really quite good, but Nell Tiger Free as the older Remmy was just perfect. The other characters were mirrors for ourselves, showing what we’d be in such a situation. Nell Tiger Free as older Remmy, though, was a brighter mirror, reflecting what we could be if were just a little bit better than we are.

Recommended.