A Wolf at the Door

A woman goes to collect her daughter from school and learns the child was taken an hour earlier by someone else. Statements begin at the police station: the mother, the father, and the father's mistress Rosa. The film tells the events three times, and each teller is protecting themselves. The truth only arrives in the last account. The hardest thing about it is that when the guilty party emerges it does not feel like a surprise but like an unavoidable result. Rosa's account carries the film's weight, and the story presents her as neither monster nor victim; it shows where a relationship built on a man's lies ends up. Fernando Coimbra wrote and directed, his first feature. Leandra Leal plays Rosa, Fabiula Nascimento plays Sylvia and Milhem Cortaz plays Bernardo. The story starts from a real case in Brazil and draws on the court record. Who it is for: anyone who likes hard Brazilian crime drama and structures that retell the same events through different mouths. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot approach the subject. A crime against a child is at the centre, the film does not avoid showing the outcome, and it offers no consolation.