The Blue Trail, the lively new film from Gabriel Mascaro, takes its name from the secretions of a mythical snail. Azure and oozing, the substance, when dropped on the iris, is rumored to grant a vision of things to come. This news is welcomed with admirable disinterest by Tereza (Denise Weinberg), a woman of a certain age who has, due to recent state insistences, decided there’s no longer much use in looking ahead. The film is set in a near-future Brazil where the lives of the elderly are overseen by some cruel combination of governmental interventions and half-interested offspring. In Tereza’s world, leaving one’s locale now requires a permission slip, and those without are rounded up in so-called “Wrinkle Wagons.” Anyone lucky enough to reach their 80th birthday, as Tereza soon will, are rewarded with a move to The Colonies: a place no one seems to know much about, aside from the fact that anyone who goes there doesn’t return.
That’s largely the set-up of Mascaro’s fourth narrative feature, a film that soon reinvents itself as a diverting romp down the Amazon river––a road movie on which Tereza will discover fresh reserves of good old joie de vivre. The Brazilian director broke on the scene a decade ago with August Winds and Neon Bull. He followed them up with Divine Love, a film that maintained the visual poetry of his earlier work but got a bit bogged down by its own polemic. That was Mascaro’s first foray into science fiction and, premiering one month into Bolsonaro’s reign as President, can perhaps be forgiven for laying it on a little thick. With Blue Trail, Mascaro returns to a similarly dystopian future, but this time the world of his film feels lived-in, nuanced, unmistakably human. Watching our lead move from one misadventure to the next, you not only start wishing the best for Tereza––you might also wish you were there.
Noting The Blue Trail‘s whispers of nearby fascism, I was reminded of Chie Hayakawa’s Plan 75, a film that imagined a near-future Japan in which the country’s aging population is being cared for with a supposedly voluntary euthanasia program. The sentiments and concerns here are much the same; for tone, the world of Mascaro’s film could hardly be more different. Along her journey of reawakenings, Tereza meets a boat captain with a taste for narcotics, an engineer attempting to fix a super-light plane (which we sadly never get to see airborne), and an eccentric female contemporary who makes her bag selling digital bibles, and from whom Tereza starts to rediscover life’s best things.
Any film looking to do what Mascaro is doing here, not least one written and directed by a filmmaker barely half the age of its protagonist, is always going to run the risk of patronizing or instrumentalizing those it looks to lift up. Yet The Blue Trail largely avoids that pitfall, some early whimsy notwithstanding. Credit to both Weinberg’s no-nonsense performance and the director’s surrealist instincts. There is a late sequence in this film, wherein Tereza visits a floating casino, that contains some of the most vividly beautiful images I’ve seen so far this year.
The Blue Trail premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.