Empty cinemapredium is a boldness of Brazilian horror against domesticated cinema

After evoking cursed cemeteries in The Lost Soul Cemetery (2020), heretics crusaders in Black Fables (2015) and zombie crabs in Black Sea (2013), the filmmaker Rodrigo Aragon Abandon the field to face the concrete.

In Empty buildingwhich hits theaters on Thursday (12), the capixaba debuts in the urban scene with a stylized, hallucinated and surprisingly intimate terror. Set in a seaside building and almost uninhabited in Guarapari, the film is an ode to the horror of shroud, demonic possessions and claustrophobic corridors, but also a story about maternity, abandonment and mutation bodies.

The change of scenario does not soften the style of Aragon. On the contrary: what we see here is the radicalization of a language that has been affirming itself as one of the most copyright of gender cinema in Brazil since the director debuted in feature films with Black mangrovein 2008.

Empty building Changes the clay and teeth rotting for neon and rusty pipes, while visceral, highlighting it as a rare work, which dare to exist in an increasingly pasteurized contemporary scenario, offering a sensory and fiercely Brazilian experience, with demonic echoes of Coffin Zé. There are also references to Sustain (1977) in saturated colors, the Ra (2007) in the use of confined space, and even Possession (1981), in the physicality of the unconscious bodies in uncontrolled.

The title building is not empty for nothing. It acts as a delirium space, a decaying middle class limbo where ghosts of the past gain meat. The protagonist Lunalived by Lorena Corrêa (Silent despair), returns to the building in search of the missing mother after the last day of Carnival. There, you find a mysterious janitor (GILDA NOMACCE, The good manners) and a diffuse evil that transforms the concrete into pulsating flesh. Aragon Bet on practical effects, their specialty, making sequences of violence a show apart: from the viscous body varnish to the choreography of demons, everything is done with palpable materiality, without depending on computer graphics.

The actors dive into the physical and emotional chaos required by a terror that gives no rest. The presence of the veteran Gildarecognized by many as an icon of Brazilian gender cinema, is an absolute hit. She enters the scene like a hurricane and prints layers to the figure of the janitor who haunts the corridors, a type of urban spectrum, injured by abandonment, whose performance resonates between grotesque and pathetic – in a good sense. His eyes and his manner is cold in the spine. The actress is at the height of her career – or rather never ceased to be.

Raw as a genre, Empty building It is not the type that hides behind embarrassed metaphors. Contrary to what you see in much of the “high” horror cinema, the news is not afraid to assume its origins. Don’t apologize for being noisy, dirty or exaggerated. Some may say that this removes him from a more “sophisticated” place, but it is precisely this courage that brings him closer to the heart of the genre. The film sounds honest in what he proposes: between one scream and another, he speaks of mourning, loneliness and the daily violence of buildings abandoned by families, the state and his own faith.

With our face, Empty building It is a bold cry of Brazilian production in the face of an increasingly domesticated cinema. This Brazilianness is everywhere and also in the details: in the fried goldfish and the seaside beer, the frowns in the building’s hall, the feiosa bus station, the application of the application driver, etc. Aragon Understands that this recognition of territory is not an obstacle to terror, but its propeller force.

Instead of copying global patterns, he confronts them with aesthetics and regionalism that assume the tropical baroque as a form of legitimate expression of horror. Aragon is not just doing terror in Brazil, he is doing terror of Brazil. And with that, it continues to expand the boundaries of what our cinema can be when it decides not to be afraid to scare.

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