Good Manners

Clara, a nurse from the outskirts of São Paulo, is hired as a nanny by Ana, who is wealthy and pregnant. An unexpected closeness forms between them. But Ana sleepwalks at night, goes looking for raw meat, and at the full moon becomes something else. The film then splits in two: a relationship drama in the first half, a story about raising a child and a werewolf fable in the second. Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra construct it as an allegory of class and race. A Black working woman enters a rich white woman's home and ends up raising her child, hiding from the city what that child is. The visual language is deliberately storybook: painted backdrops, pale skies, songs. It won the Special Jury Prize at the seventieth Locarno film festival. Its flaws: the tonal break between the halves is abrupt, the second half runs long, and the effects make the budget visible. Who it is for: viewers who like genre mixture and social allegory. Who it is not for: anyone expecting conventional horror.