DUBAI: Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho’s political thriller may be set during his homeland’s turbulent 1970s — under a military dictatorship that committed extensive human rights abuses — but this ambitious, layered, and beautifully realized movie is loaded with timely reminders of what happens when political violence and moral turpitude are normalized, and — in one memorable fantastical scene — when fake news turns into mass hysteria.
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The film follows Marcelo (the compelling Wagner Moura), an academic working in engineering, who discovered that a government minister was shutting down his university department in order to funnel its research into a private company in which the minister owned shares. When Marcelo points out the corruption, he becomes a marked man and must go on the run, leaving his young son with the parents of his late wife. He is moved to a safe house in Recife, run by the sweet-but-steely Dona Sebastiana (an effervescent Tania Maria) on behalf of a resistance group. They find him a job in the government department responsible for issuing ID cards.
Here he meets the despicable Euclides (Roberio Diogenes) — a corrupt cop whose department uses a carnival as cover to carry out extrajudicial murders — and his goons. He also learns that the minister with whom he argued has hired two hitmen to kill him. Time is running out. But soon he should have his fake passport and be able to flee.
