Critics reviews

Suffice it to say that the highly original story is just one of the achievements of Good Manners. The film is one of the most distinctive looking I've seen in some time.

The trouble is that though co-directors Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra are bold to derail what initially seems like yet another cinematic instrumentalization of Brazilian class-racial relations, they're unable to subvert one of Brazilian cinema's worst stylistic habits: a certain mix of stiff soap operatic acting and formulaic Hollywood mise-en-scène that's devoid of structural experimentation.

Wondrously weird and a skosh too long. . . . Swerving from predictable to confounding, dreamy to demented, artful to awkward, this genre-twisting hybrid from Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra links art house and slaughterhouse with unexpected success.

The film's second act observes how the kid's existence plays out in new circumstances, and uses the horror trappings to morph into a drama of societal trauma for all involved. . . . Nevertheless, Good Manners could use some compression, and maybe has a case of good manners itself in dutifully schematizing racial themes represented with greater brio in generations of Brazilian cinema past.

If The Guilty doubles down on genre, distilling the thriller into a highly concentrated form, Good Manners goes audaciously in the opposite direction. Even as Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s rollicking second feature revels in the classic tropes of horror and fantasy, it bends them into other genres with a freewheeling playfulness.

Following the more realist Hard Labor, which premiered at Cannes in 2011, Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s new fiction feature is a rapturous, at times freewheeling tale that mixes social drama, horror, and even a touch of musical.