Повествование истории идёт от первого лица — неназванного магистрата маленького колониального городка, находящегося на самой границе «Империи». Его размеренная жизнь прерывается объявлением Империи чрезвычайного положения и приездом полковника Третьего отдела в связи со слухами, что коренные народы на границе, называемые колонистами варварами, готовятся к нападению на город. После недолгого расследования в городе Третий отдел организует экспедицию в земли, лежащие за границей Империи. В этой экспедиции полковник Джолл захватывает нескольких варваров и привозит их в город, где пытает и убивает пленных, а позже уезжает в столицу, чтобы подготовиться к более серьёзной кампании против варваров.

В то же время Магистрат начинает задаваться вопросом законности империализма и лично занимается лечением девушки-варвара, которая после пыток осталась хромой и практически слепой. У Магистрата зарождается интимная, однако не определённая связь с девушкой и, в итоге, он решает отвезти её обратно к племени. После долгого изнурительного путешествия по зимней пустыне, во время которой пара впервые занималась сексом, он доставляет девушку к её племени. В конце путешествия он задаёт ей вопрос, не хотела бы она вернуться обратно в город, но та отказывается. По возвращению назад Магистрат арестован Третьим отделом по подозрению в измене. В ожидании суда, который в условиях чрезвычайного положения отложен на неопределённый срок, Магистрат подвергается пыткам и издевательствам, но, когда ему удаётся достать ключ и выбраться на свободу, то понимает, что ему некуда идти и возвращается обратно в тюрьму.

После карательной экспедиции полковник Джолл с триумфом возвращается в город, приведя с собой несколько пленных варваров и проводит публичную экзекуцию. Хотя толпа с радостью участвует в пытках, Магистрат встаёт на защиту пленных и пытается прервать действие, но его останавливают. За его самодеятельность группа солдат подвешивает Магистрата на дерево за руки, что ещё больше приводит того к пониманию о жестокости империализма. Эти пытки полностью лишают Магистрата духа и солдаты в насмешку разрешают ему бродить по городу, зная, что тот больше не причинит им никаких неприятностей. Однако с наступлением зимы, после сворачивания кампании против варваров, солдаты начинают покидать город. Магистрат делает ещё одну попытку наставить Джолла на правильный путь, но тот отказывается с ним разговаривать и покидает город с остатками солдат. В городе начинают расползаться слухи, что варвары вскоре нападут на город, и многие горожане с последними солдатами начинают покидать город. Магистрат же старается воодушевить оставшихся и помочь им подготовиться к зиме. Наступает зима, однако никаких свидетельств близящегося нападения варваров нет.

In Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s drama about immigration and integration ”Waiting for the Barbarians” Johnny Depp plays the ruthless Colonel Joll, a torturer who is in charge of the security situation on the border and who clashes with a morally upright magistrate.

In Venice, where the film premiered on Friday in competition, Depp said Guerra gave him the perfect prop for this role. A special pair of mean metal shades.

”When Ciro came up with that shape…They were threatening; they were menacing somehow,” Depp said. And ”the fact that he didn’t take them off,” added to the threat.

”He wore them to make the magistrate as uncomfortable as possible,” Depp added.

”I think he’s learned a number of tricks over the years. He realized that stillness and silence and quiet, and holding your response to a question, is quite disturbing to the person on the other side,” Depp went on to point out.

Mark Rylance, who plays the magistrate, said that what helped him get into his role was the realization ”that we are part of a barbaric culture,” by living in England ”due to the imperialism of the English nation.”

The actions that South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, whose novel by the same title the film is based on, ”describe steps that the magistrate is going through that are very understandable,” he said. At first he tries to ignore the torture and ”then it arrives at your door in the form of a poor young girl whose been crippled and blinded, and you bring that person into your heart, and you try and rescue them,” he noted.

The problem, Rylance went on, is that the magistrate’s attempt to rescue the young woman ”is also just a form of power.”

It’s ”just a form of affirming that I’m the powerful one, and you’re the victim,” he underlined.

”The characters that Johnny and I play are really two sides of the same coin,” said Rylance.

”The torturer and the rescuer are both still in danger of victimizing the people that they are torturing or rescuing. That is the remarkable thing about this story for me.”

Guerra, the director, pointed out that when he first read the novel, which he adapted together with Coetzee, he found it to be ”a powerful allegory.”

”It was very connected…to things done in the past,” Guerra said. But then ”during the process of making the film it became less and less an allegory and more and more connected to the present.”

The Colombian director Ciro Guerra (Embrace of the Serpent) seems interested in the processes by which the west colonised the rest, so it’s fitting that he has cast two big Hollywood stars – Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson – in his latest, premiering ominously on the second to last day of the Venice film festival, when roughly a third of the press corps have decamped to Toronto.

An adaptation of JM Coetzee’s 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians tells the story of a magistrate presiding over an unidentified colonial outpost in the middle of the desert, presumably in the first decades of the last century. Gentle-voiced and crinkly eyed and played by Mark Rylance, he sees his comfortable equanimity shattered by the arrival of state security officers. They’re led by Depp, who looks more like a skull wrapped in butcher’s paper every day. Evocatively photographed by Chris Menges in Morocco as well as Italy, Guerra’s stately, frequently horrific fifth feature recalls both Kafka’s In the Penal Colony and Graham Greene, with Rylance as a sad sack powerless to stop the ruthlessly mechanical infliction of pain.

Chapter headings that cycle through the seasons signpost the unravelling that occurs after Depp’s Colonel Joll arrives for an inspection and begins torturing the locals. A nomad accused of stealing a sheep has his eye gouged out, but not before ”admitting” that his people are readying for a full-blown frontier war. That news, as well as the magistrate’s discomfort with the colonel’s methods, is reported up the chain, leading to further intervention from the navy-suited state police. It’s easy to read the film as a not particularly subtle metaphor for fascism or ”the war on terror”, and its black hats aren’t so much characters as automatons.

Hair slicked back and parted down the middle, Depp sports a natty pair of circular sunglasses that obscure the colonel’s eyes and emotions, if indeed he has any. Working again with the kind of indie auteur he gravitated towards before his 15-year run as a blockbuster star, the actor makes a meal of some of his lines here, but he seems positively relaxed next to Pattinson, playing a variation on the diabolical theme.

Pattinson is a puzzle. Such a revelation in Good Time, and charismatically enigmatic in The Lost City of Z, he just as often looks uncomfortable. His performance here is somehow both stiff and overarticulated. At least he gets one of the film’s best lines, when he thanks the residents of the fort he’s terrorised for their hospitality, then scarpers.

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Greta Scacchi has a thankless role as a cook running Rylance’s household, but the magistrate’s key relationship is with an Indigenous woman (Gana Bayarsaikhan) crippled by Depp’s toadies. His deepening affection for her leads him into the desert to return the girl to her people, and some of the widescreen compositions in this section – of stucco parapets silhouetted against a darkening blue sky, of riders ringed by bands of sun-gold at dusk – have a startling beauty. But the grandeur of the wide open spaces is short lived, and on the magistrate’s return he’s thrown into a cell for treating with the enemy.

His rejection by the woman he loves but failed to protect presages a more pointed reckoning, and the magistrate is left, in the end, holding the bag. Guerra has tweaked the novel’s Beckettian coda, and the film’s final shot provides a full stop that is, in 2019, appropriately apocalyptic. The barbarians are us, and the wait is over.