Director: Karim Aïnouz

Stars: Iago Xavier, Nataly Rocha, Fábio Assunção, Renan Capivara

Shades of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ in this deliriously erotic but flawed Brazilian noir-tinged thriller. It opens with handsome twenty-one-year-old Heraldo (Xavier) frolicking about on the beach with his older brother Jorge (Capivara). Heraldo is keen to leave their smalltown life behind and make his way to the city, but the brothers must first carry out a two-man hit job for local crime boss Bambina. Things go awry after Heraldo drunkenly hooks up the night before the hit is due to take place, and winds up at the titular roadside hotel with a drunken woman. The motel, ran by the boorish, capricious and almost comically lubricious Elias (Assunção coming on like a late period seedy Mickey Rourke) and his more sympathetic younger wife Dayana (Rocha), is, evidently, used almost exclusively for sex. Keen to avoid the attention of the law and Bambina, Heraldo persuades the couple to employ him as a handyman, and a complicated three-way relationship ensues. The striking production design by Hélène Louvart (who also photographed ‘La Chimera’), with the motel and its boxy rooms rendered in lurid hot pink neon, along with Fernando Aranha’s sound effects that consist mainly of rutting and groaning noises from porn movies or the guests, suggests a kind of sex purgatory. The film boasts a brash trashy energy, but the script feels undercooked and protagonist Heraldo a blank slate, while the Lynchian surrealist touches feel surplus to requirement.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Bluesky  @davidwilloughby.bsky.social