The Blue Trail: a senior citizen flees dystopian Brazil for a freewheeling Amazonian adventure

• Reviewed from the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

Following Divine Love (2019), his neon-styled religious parable set in 2027, Gabriel Mascaro has returned with another idiosyncratic vision of a near-future Brazil – a dystopia, certainly, but one that’s played for its absurdity and wry social critique rather than any lasting sense of terror or gloom. 

Its protagonist is 77-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg, a veteran of Brazilian stage and screen), who in the opening scenes is bemused to be presented with a state award recognising her as ‘national living heritage’. But the medal and laurels hung over her door are just a ridiculous kind of buttering up ahead of grimmer news: due to a lowering of the age threshold, she’s to be moved to a government colony where senior citizens are taken to live out their final years, leaving the younger generations free to be more productive and help boost the economy.

It’s a set-up that Yorgos Lanthimos might have dreamt up and then dialled up the deadpan oddity. But Mascaro establishes a broadly plausible discriminatory future, where the elderly are rounded up in ‘wrinkle wagons’ and put out to pasture, but he does so mainly to relish the sense of open-aired liberation when Tereza eventually escapes on a journey of late-life self-discovery. 

At first her efforts are thwarted. She can’t buy a passenger flight to freedom, as her daughter Joana (Clarissa Pinheiro) has been made her guardian and must authorise her card payments. But she hears about a light aircraft she can pay for cash-in-hand in Itacoatiara, a cargo port in the Amazon, and persuades a riverboat captain, Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro), to take her there.

The two-hander voyage that follows suggests an African Queen-type scenario, as the doughty pensioner must live cheek-by-jowl with the unkempt boatman. But, unlike Bogart’s character, Cadu’s favoured substance isn’t gin but the slime of the rare ‘blue drool snail’. When their boat is held up on the riverside, Cadu eagerly trials this sapphire-coloured gunk in a scene that slips into magical realism. It’s said that a drop in each eye enables a person to see their own future.

Tereza has already been presented with a vision of her future, and she doesn’t like it one bit. Her attempt to shape a new one becomes a picaresque odyssey that twists and turns like bends of the river. She’s captured and then re-escapes, but the story is less about the threat of pursuit than her freewheeling encounters, the rough-and-ready charm of the outsiders who help her along her way, and the route to a new sense of herself. 

Further upriver she falls in with another elderly free spirit, a woman known as ‘The Nun’ (Miriam Socarrás), who scrapes a living flogging digital Bibles from her boatside. Mascaro finds a counter-measure of utopianism in his depiction of these two ageing souls finding a connection and eking out an existence that’s free from the limitations society seeks to impose on them. 

If The Blue Trail avoids most of the ready sentimentality of so many late-life renaissance movies, it’s down to the earthy sensuality of the women’s bond and the unforced chemistry between actors Weinberg and Socarrás. As in his earlier films, such as the 2015 rodeo drama Neon Bull, Mascaro’s images revel in physicality. He finds a tender eroticism in Tereza’s rediscovery of her own body and the simple joy of bathing.

With its wide vistas of Amazon waterways and riversides (shot by Guillermo Garza, whose credits include episodes of Apple TV’s 2021 series The Mosquito Coast), The Blue Trail calls to mind Werner Herzog’s Amazon movies, with Tereza as a kind of OAP Fitzcarraldo setting out with big dreams of her own. But a later trip into the lysergic fluorescence of a gambling den called the Golden Fish is closer to the Herzog of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), at once goofy, violent and surreal. 

Arresting as this scene is, there’s a sense by this point that the storytelling has begun to float along, with no real sense of drive or destination. The engine sputters out, but the film encourages you to trail your hand in the water and enjoy the drift.