The Blue Trail: a senior citizen flees dystopian Brazil for a freewheeling Amazonian adventure

• Reviewed from the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

Following Divine Love (2019), his neon-styled religious parable set in 2027, Gabriel Mascaro has returned with another idiosyncratic vision of a near-future Brazil. The Blue Trail imagines an authoritarian dystopia which feels plausibly like it’s one cockeyed piece of legislation away from our present, but the Brazilian director plays the situation for its absurdity and wry social critique rather than any lasting sense of terror or as a gloomy prognostication.

Its protagonist is 77-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg, a veteran of Brazilian stage and screen), who in the opening scenes is bemused to be presented with a state award recognising her as ‘national living heritage’. But the fake-gold medal and laurels hung over her door by a government official are just an absurd kind of buttering up ahead of grimmer news: due to a lowering of the age threshold, she’s to be moved to a government colony where senior citizens are taken to live out their final years, leaving the younger generations free to work harder and help boost the economy. Old people are “sabotaging national productivity”, the state’s logic goes. As in the title of Leo McCarey’s great 1937 film about the neglect of the elderly, they must make way for tomorrow.

It’s a set-up that Yorgos Lanthimos might have dreamt up and then dialled up its deadpan oddity. Mascaro enjoys some eccentric detail, such as the caged ‘wrinkle wagons’ in which the elderly are rounded up and put out to pasture (Mascaro based these on wagons he remembers being used to pick up stray dogs when he was a kid). But notwithstanding some plasma screens at a bus station, this is a low-tech futurescape in which the sci-fi trappings feel organically embedded in contemporary Brazilian social realities. Far from chilly or cynical, Mascaro’s film establishes its discriminatory future mainly to relish a humane sense of open-aired liberation and possibility when Tereza eventually escapes on a journey of late-life self-discovery.

At first her efforts are thwarted. She can’t buy a passenger flight to freedom, as her daughter Joana (Clarissa Pinheiro) has been made her guardian and must authorise her card payments. But Tereza hears about a light aircraft she can pay for cash-in-hand at a cargo port in the Amazon, and persuades a rugged riverboat captain – Cadu, played by Brazilian TV star Rodrigo Santoro, familiar here for big screen roles in Love Actually (2003), 300 (2006) and Hector Babenco’s Carandiru (2003) – to take her there.

The two-handed voyage that follows becomes an African Queen-type scenario, as the doughty pensioner must live cheek-by-jowl with the unkempt boatman. But where Bogart’s character in the 1951 John Huston film is a sucker for gin, Cadu’s favoured substance is the mystical slime of the rare ‘blue drool snail’. When their boat is held up on the riverside, Cadu eagerly samples this sapphire-coloured gunk and slips into a hallucinatory fugue state. It’s said that a drop in each eyeball enables a person to see their own future.

Tereza has already been presented with a vision of her future, and she doesn’t like what she sees. Her attempt to shape a new one becomes an unpredictable picaresque odyssey. Both in its critique of the corrupting, tradition-devouring logic of capitalist progress and its freewheeling, peripatetic storytelling, The Blue Trail exists downstream of films such as Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1969) and Carlos Diegues’s Bye Bye Brasil (1979): carnivalesque journey narratives that patch together a reflection of the Brazilian soul. Mascaro’s film is less about the threat of pursuit – this is an unusually benign dystopia in which there seems to be little sustained attempt to bring Tereza to ground – than about its heroine’s wandering encounters, and the rough-and-ready charm of the various outsiders who ply their trade by the river and help her along her way. As she ventures into Brazil’s jungly interior, the film finds her reconnecting with nature and the ancient ambience of the rainforest.

Further upriver she falls in with another elderly free spirit – Roberta (Miriam Socarrás), known locally as ‘the Nun’ – who scrapes a living flogging digital-tablet Bibles from her boat. Despite the whiff of snake-oil about the venture, with its historic echoes of missionaries bringing colonial belief systems to indigenous communities, Tereza proves a skilful saleswoman and vibes with Roberta’s easygoing ethos. “I go where the river takes me,” the atheist ‘nun’ tells her. Set adrift from his film’s Orwellian beginnings, Mascaro finds a countercurrent of utopianism in his depiction of these two ageing souls finding a connection. Together, they forge an existence that evades the limitations an ageist neoliberal society seeks to impose on them.

If The Blue Trail avoids most of the ready sentimentality of so many Bucket List-style late-life renaissance movies, it’s down to the earthy sensuality of these women’s bond and the unforced chemistry between actors Weinberg and Socarrás. As in Mascaro’s earlier films, such as the 2015 rodeo drama Neon Bull, the images – here warmly coloured and compacted into a 4:3 frame – revel in physicality. He finds a tender eroticism in Tereza’s rediscovery of her own body and the simple joys of bathing, massages and psychedelic substances.

With its wide vistas of Amazon waterways and riversides (shot by Guillermo Garza, whose credits include episodes of Apple TV’s series The Mosquito Coast, 2021-23), The Blue Trail also inevitably calls to mind Werner Herzog’s Amazon movies, with Tereza a kind of OAP Fitzcarraldo setting out with big dreams of her own. An evocative soundtrack of jungle noises and tropical atmosphere adds to the immersive head-trip. But a later excursion into the trippy ultraviolet of a fabled gambling den called the Golden Fish is closer to the psychotropic, more cartoonish Herzog of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009). At once goofy and surreal, it finds Tereza playing for high stakes at a Siamese fighting fish contest.

Vivid as this scene is, by this point the storytelling has begun to float along, with no real sense of drive or destination. Lacking threat or a more incisive comment about recent swings to and from repressive politics in Brazil, Mascaro’s dystopia is more feelgood and lightweight than it might have been. The film’s speculative fictional elements end up feeling incidental to the personal journey, with none of the bite of Bacurau (2019), a savage sci-fi satire by another Recife-born filmmaker, Kleber Mendonça Filho. By the final scenes, the story’s engine has sputtered out, but there’s pleasure in trailing your hand in the water and enjoying the drift.

► The Blue Trail is in UK cinemas 17April.