Premiering in the Locarno Film Festival’s main competition, The Riverbank (orig. A Margem do Rio) is a queer thriller from Enock Carvalho and Matheus Farias, making their feature debut.
Izaquiel (Caique Copque) works as a cleaner in Recife. While he spends his days at a dreary job trying to make ends meet, he shares an apartment with a rambunctious chosen family of trans women.
At night, however, he seeks out secret encounters in the mangroves along the river, where he meets an enigmatic fisherman, Jeremias (Ítalo Martins). An eruption of homophobic violence nearby interrupts their encounter, but it also forges a bond between the two men.
The Riverbank is a queer drama that gradually assumes the contours of a nocturnal thriller, using the mangrove not only as a political space but also as a psychological counter-territory to the more sterile environment where Izaquiel spends his working day.
Carvalho and Farias treat the mangrove as a form of queer geography. Its muddy, amphibious landscape resists clean divisions between earth and water, safety and danger, corruption and regeneration. Such liminality provides a fitting spatial correlative for lives pushed beyond the officially sanctioned configurations of mainstream society.
After an incident forces Izaquiel to relocate for his day job to a religious community, paradoxically, because of homophobiam, the tension becomes more palpable. The pastor orders him to stop wearing earrings and nail polish to work.
Serving as a janitor in the pastor’s temple, Izaquiel witnesses baptisms, but gradually, and not unexpectedly, he begins to observe more of the community’s so-called religious behavior as it skews toward the right, and then the militarized far right. The nocturnal attacks on gay men in the mangroves soon leave a trail leading into the pastor’s inner circle.
The Riverbank belongs to a Pernambuco cinematic genealogy that has repeatedly used genre to examine the political organization of space. Brazilian films have tackled the country’s rightward turn and religion’s effects on society in works such as Anita Rocha da Silveira’s Medusa and Gabriel Mascaro’s Divine Love.
Mascaro imagined an evangelical near-future in which religious fervor, bureaucratic procedure and sexual ritual had fused into a seamless apparatus of social governance. Its fluorescent surfaces exposed a theocracy that did not suppress desire outright but instead attempted to administer it, redirecting intimacy toward marriage, reproduction and religious obedience.
Carvalho and Farias approach the subject more head-on. While The Riverbank might initially resemble another social drama, Izaquiel’s entanglement with the pastor and his self-appointed vigilantes transforms it into a thriller about class and identity.
Carvalho and Farias employ a neon-fluorescent style for the religious community similar to Mascaro’s, creating a seemingly coherent space. The visual echo plays less like imitation than a shared statement, although this one is delivered from the perspective of an underclass defined both economically and by identity.
The Riverbank, however, remains a slow-burning thriller, shifting its attention toward Izaquiel’s carefully constructed awakening. He initially regards the pastor as a missing father figure, someone who welcomes him into the inner circle. But an incident involving the pastor’s son shatters the illusion that this religious community could ever accept Izaquiel as he is, just as he is no longer willing to suppress his personality.
Luciana Baseggio’s cinematography echoes Diego García’s work on Divine Love, although Carvalho and Farias operate on a much smaller budget, evident in the story’s confinement to a handful of dominant spaces. From the supermarket, the clearest stand-in for society at large, the story moves to the pastor’s compound, tightening the theocratic right’s grip on the narrative. That power eventually invades the queer inner sanctum of the mangroves, pushing Izaquiel toward an inevitable confrontation, first with himself and then with the pastor.
At nearly two hours, The Riverbank takes its slow-burning construction almost too literally. Its atmospheric drift occasionally risks settling into stasis, and a judicious trim would give the steadily gathering threat greater pressure.
Yet Luciana Baseggio’s cinematography sustains the film’s clear neo-noir stylization, contrasting the blue-black refuge of the mangroves with the fluorescent sterility of the religious compound. Carvalho and Farias bend several genres over the course of The Riverbank. What begins as an ostensible social drama tightens into a queer thriller with neo-noir contours before being overtaken by an unsentimental romance.
Its anti-right-wing politics are unambiguous. Queer and trans people are forced into hiding by a homophobic climate cultivated by religious circles willing to militarize their rhetoric of purity and turn it into a murderous campaign.
Yet the filmmakers avoid the conventional catharsis in the thriller convention. The thriller’s logic is ultimately displaced not by retaliatory bloodshed but by intimacy and survival, a refusal to become a mirror image of their persecutors.
The film screened earlier this month at the Locarno Film Festival.