To work nights is to encourage madness. To do so in a morgue is sentence to delusion. Forfeiting the dreamless night for daytime tremors will let evil unbidden into your home. Dennison Ramalho’s horror-drama “The Night Shifter” works through these premises with spry abandon, offering gratuitous gore and — squinting hard — social commentary wrought from Brazil’s current political descent into reactionary authoritarianism. Although made before Bolsonaro’s election, ‘Night Shifter’ has markers of the civil unrest that delivers demagogues: thuggery, poverty, brutality, misogyny, fanaticism. Yet these elements are obscured in a world where the dead speak, the damned return, and police authority ceases to exist. Here, sovereign is he who decides on the demonic.
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Stênio (Daniel de Oliveira) is coroner at a morgue in São Paulo, shot from afar as a heaving, glittering metropolis. He possesses a paranormal gift that allows him to speak with the dead. At night, he converses with a deceased cavalcade, mostly criminals, gang members, hooligans. For a man able to break bread with the lifeless — a skill developed without explanation — Stênio has remarkably inane and perfunctory patter. He notes stab wounds and deduces criminality; he sees gunshot wounds and arrives at foul play. Diminished daylight imbues him with eerie moralism, as he castigates the rolling cast of “thugs” who adorn his concrete slab. Through one such thug, a revelation is at hand: his wife Odete (Fabíula Nascimento, suitably nasty) is having an affair. This way envy and destruction lie. Subsequent murders elicit an unrelenting supernatural force. The aggrieved won’t stop, flipping the targets of jealousy and contempt. Their two children will suffer.
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Cycling through a carousel of influences — from Dario Argento to Sam Raimi, George A. Romero to John Carpenter — Ramahlo splices genre and form, jump scares and moody tones, comic absurdity, and copious blood. It’s a self-consciously commercial work that is neither too scary nor knotty, prodding rather than exploring the politics that it metaphorizes into cartoon violence and ghoulish possessions. The talking dead come alive through baffling digital effects, their brows fixed and mouths distorted, risible and grotesque. Our bird’s-eye view holds them in portrait. Oliveira offers Stênio a constant expression of bovine shock, one of dopey eyes, uncertain jowls and hilarious stupor. Despite the persistent maladies that comprise his misfortune, Stênio’s advancing credulity amuses, dire strait placed upon dire strait. Intended comic moments, seemingly insisted upon by the producers, are less tickling, more commercially inclined.
The foundation is a somewhat po-faced drama, on top of which the thawing sheet of ludicrous horror splinters. Thunder, lightning, the alternatingly ominous and screeching score: all contribute to a pleasing pointedness and knowing theatricality. Yet underpinning these genre thrills is Stênio’s forlorn relationship with pious Lara (Bianca Comparato, suitably angelic until inevitable possession), one bereft of humor, eroticism, any shiver of joy. More sketched out is the theme of ownership, of man’s dominion over women, the household, the hypocrisies of marriage. The wedding ring endures as a perverse motif, no matter the times cast off. Urban decay and inequality are hinted at through a small café’s attempted gentrification.
One scene in the morgue stands apart. A landslide brings through a mass of ungrateful dead. The screaming cacophony debilitates Stênio, producing a whirring of sensory sickness, a negation of physiological and psychological control. It brought to mind Lore Segal’s story “The Reverse Bug,” in which thought cannot be articulated when the horror of history prevails. If ‘Night Shifter’ has political potency and effect, it is through Stênio’s inability to confront the screaming, mirroring impotence in the wake of social trauma.
The film is another addition to what Ramahlo describes as the “renaissance of horror” in Brazilian cinema, following on from Guto Parente’s “The Cannibal Club” and Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s “Good Manners.” As with the latter film, which ended predictably penned in, pitchforks and barbarians at the gate, ‘Night Shifter’ struggles to a finish. Stênio must face consequences, leading to his aimless jog into the ether. Odete has wreaked terror on the home and children, spitefully constructing a peculiar poetics of justice, a mosaic of sliced throats and hallucination. The rule holds: the higher the escalation, the more difficult the denouement. Said conclusion is dissatisfying but explicable: this is the starting point for a television series, soon to begin production. Fine, but the open-endedness undercuts this as a complete work. Throughout, Stênio faces repeated calls to return, to come back, to answer for his crimes. This culminates in a fabular turn, that redemption is sought by running away, by taking on the burden of evil. Frankenstein’s monster carries the curse from the children. [C]