Reflective Encounters

“A musician – we gather, because he carries a guitar - takes refuge in a seemingly abandoned house. Three minutes of screen time later, some force, maybe even the earth itself, will have rebelled against his transgression. Finding a molar tooth in the back yard, body horror commences. 

Writer-director Tiago Teixeira sets the film in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. The film’s recurrent images of torture, of isolation, and of the separation of body parts, enhances an undercurrent suggestive of the brutal Brazilian military dictatorship, which was established in 1964 and existed until 1985. 

Molar situates this political underpinning within the genre of folk horror, which relies on the notion that the world harbours horrors that existed long before and will continue to exist long after humankind (and is only waiting for us to find such horrors). In doing so, Teixeira suggests that the ongoing political violence in Brazil – with current President (at time of writing, with the first round of elections due October 2nd!) Jair Bolsonaro openly glorifying the dictatorship era – is linked to a colonial legacy which stretches back far beyond musician, house, or even that tooth.”

— Ben Flanagan