In Pictures of Ghosts, from 2023, Kleber Mendonça Filho elegised the vanished movie palaces of Brazil’s Recife, chronicling the intimate overlap of cinema and memory. His new feature – nominated for four Oscars, including best picture – returns to that coastal city with a different agenda. Here is a nervy, labyrinthine, political thriller set in 1977, during what an opening title wryly calls “a time of great mischief”. That phrase does little to convey the suffocating paranoia of Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Wagner Moura plays Armando, an enigmatic widowed academic forced into hiding after a clash with a corrupt federal official eager to appropriate his research. Fleeing north to reunite with his young son, he finds refuge among fellow dissidents while taking a job in the state archives as cover.
Recife, the director’s muse since his feature debut Neighbouring Sounds, is rendered here as a sun-bleached beachfront mirage where bodies lie unattended at gas stations, bribes are routine, and danger hums.
It’s an odd arrangement: despite the languid pacing, the film evokes conspiracy chillers of the 1970s such as Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View. Mendonça Filho loosens and unpicks these genre strictures with eruptions of the surreal.
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A severed leg, pulled from a shark’s stomach in a wink to Jaws, embarks on a delirious rampage drawn from an urban legend used to veil reports of police violence. The sequence is outrageous, almost funny, and wholly in keeping with a politically murky world where truth is both coded and corrosive.
In a darkly comic subplot, the late, great Udo Kier cameos as a Jewish Holocaust survivor incorrectly assumed to be a Nazi fugitive.
Cinephilia courses through the picture. Key scenes unfold in a grand old theatre managed by Armando’s father-in-law, showing The Omen to jumpy crowds seeking communal escape. Flash-forwards to the present, in which researchers reconstruct Armando’s fate for his now grown son, lend the film a mournful outro. In Mendonça Filho’s slippery moral universe, revelation offers neither catharsis nor closure, only the squeamish knowledge that some nightmares end, and others are obscured by history.
In cinemas from February 20th
