Are
esoteric rituals something kids grow out of? Horror movie fans are the wrong
people to ask. Regardless, nine-year-old Dalva’s natural affinity for magic and
her motivations for dabbling are not going away anytime soon. Mending her
family will take extreme measures, but she is willing to risk opening Pandora’s
Box in Gabriela Amaral Almeida’s The
Father’s Shadow, which won the Best Actress Award and Special Jury Mention
at the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Young
Dalva is nowhere close to being over her mother’s untimely death, but she is
still in much better shape than her father Jorge. He has basically shut down,
robotically laboring away in his Sao Paulo construction job and barely going
through the motions at home. In contrast, Dalva soaks up her Aunt Cristina’s
white magic lessons that she in turn applies on behalf of her classmates. Maybe
that is not such a good idea, but at least she is being social.
Unfortunately,
when Cristina gets engaged to the distribution marketing stooge of her dreams,
she leaves Dalva solely in Jorge’s sullen care. Alas, her father further
withdraws into himself when his best friend at work is laid-off and
subsequently dies in an accident that might very well be suicide. Jorge only
rouses himself to roughly forbid Dalva’s practice of the mysterious craft,
which drives them even further apart.
Father’s Shadow represents a
considerable change of pace after the bloody chaos of Amaral’s first feature, Friendly Beast, like a change-up
following a fastball, in American baseball terms. There is still a pronounced
class consciousness, but it manifests itself in drastically different ways.
Dalva’s environment is desperately poor and her father is as working-class as
one can be, but that is the only reality she ever knew and as natural as the
air she breathes.
By
cinematic standards, Father’s Shadow is
unusually evocative. You can practically feel the heat from the blow-torches at
the construction site and smell the earth when Dalva’s mother is exhumed from
the graveyard, so she can be reinterred in a cheaper drawer (talk about bad
karma) early in the film. However, many of the genre elements are not fully and
consistently realized, like the ominous welder shadowing Jorge, who sometimes
appears to be a symbolic embodiment of his guilt, while other times he could
have stepped out of a vintage slasher movie.
Frankly,
it is hard to decide what to make of Father’s
Shadow, because it struggles with its own identity crisis. Yet, it is safe
to say young Nina Medeiros will impress everyone as Dalva. It is an eerie and
ambiguous performance, but her pain and vulnerability are always palpable.
Nobody will begrudge her the Best Actress award she snagged at this year’s
Fantasia, like the Anna Paquin of Brazilian horror.
Arguably,
Father’s Shadow signals a bit of a
trend towards art-house horror in Brazil, along with Marco Dutra & Juliana
Rojas’s Good Manners, but the earlier
werewolf film was slyer and ultimately more satisfying in genre terms. Both
Medeiros and Amaral show a facility for handling a wide spectrum of extreme
emotions, but this film is more likely to be remembered as a stepping stone in
their careers rather than as a genre touchstone to return to periodically. So,
cheers Nina Medeiros. It is a film you will respect, but Friendly Beasts was much more fun. Recommended for viewers who take
their horror with a strong dose social realism, Father’s Shadow should have a long festival life after its North
American premiere (with nicely translated English subtitles) at this year’s
Fantasia. Portuguese translation to come, courtesy of the truly amazing
Angelica Sakurada.
