Of all the work we saw last year, few were received as rapturously as Pedro Costa‘s Horse Money, which we called “the Costa film that best exemplifies the influence of classical Hollywood genre cinema on his work, with both the ghostly hospital where Ventura resides and the looming hell-tunnel he frequently travels feeling like they came straight out of a Jacques Tourneur or Fritz Lang film.” Finally, almost a year after its debut on the international festival circuit, it’s entering a limited domestic release, and the first trailer is here to stun with a dark, expressionistic depiction of Fontainhas, Portugal.
Set to Os Tubarões “Alto Cutelo,” an earworm featured prominently within the film, this preview is content with being a visual marvel, offering only a limited amount about Costa’s authority-scathing narrative. Better to leave that to the picture itself, for the means in which it unfolds should (needless to say) be experienced naturally; all of these images could already stand as individual works of art. If you ask us, Horse Money is something that can’t be missed.
Watch the trailer below:
Synopsis:
A visionary masterwork from the renowned director of COLOSSAL YOUTH, Pedro Costa’s HORSE MONEY is a mesmerizing odyssey into the real, imagined and nightmarish memories of the elderly Ventura, a Cape Verdean immigrant living in Lisbon. The time is now, a numbing and timeless present of hospital stays, bureaucratic questioning, and wandering through remembered spaces… and suddenly it is also then, the mid ’70s and the time of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, when Ventura got into a knife fight with his friend Joaquim. HORSE MONEY is a self-reckoning, a moving memorialization of lives in danger of being forgotten, as well as a piercingly beautiful work of modern cinema.
Horse Money will enter limited release on July 24.