As Boas Maneiras AKA Good Manners (2017)


director: Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra
release-year: 2017
genres: horror, philosophical, shocktober, werewolf
countries: Brazil
languages: Portuguese
fests: SHOCKtober 2024: WOLFtober

A rich lady, Ana, is interviewing Clara to be a live-in nanny for her upcoming child. Clara has no references and her answers are friendly, but curt and undetailed. She's a trained nurse, though, and she gets the job by giving Ana a basic breathing exercise. When Clara gets home, her landlord is not at all convinced that she can hold down a job.

A beautiful sci-fi night in Brazil.

She moves in to Ana's home, and finds only bags and bags of meat in the fridge. The apartment has a fake fireplace, and a view over a fake semi-sci-fi city backdrop.

Pretty much the same as every rich person's apartment.

Ana is just as mysterious as Clara. She seems unusually concerned about her baby, perhaps even afraid of it. People she recognizes in the street ignore her. She appears rich, but her credit card is declined. Despite being pregnant, Ana gets solidly wasted. She claims it's her birthday, but she's all alone with not but a crate of beer. She tells Clara that her family cut her off and went no-contact because of the pregnancy, and her fiancé left her.

They left her a pile of money, though.

On her doctor's orders, all of Ana's meat is replaced with vegetables. Clara finds her digging sadly through the fridge in the middle of the night. When disrupted, she sniffs Clara disturbingly, then literally bites her tongue. All this while leaving the fridge door wide open, which is terrible for both the food and the environment. In the morning, they pretend weirdly like nothing happened.

Bitten, but not bitten off.

Nearly all of the characters are women, and they tend towards lesbianism. The soundtrack is almost exclusively mild buzzing sounds.

They talk about subjects other than men.

Ana seems to have a sleepwalking problem. Clara follows her as she pads slowly through the city, barefoot and asleep. It seems rude to let someone you care about walk around a filthy city like that. Ana eats a cat.

This is why stray cats hate being picked up.

Clara thinks it's a perfectly normal combination of sleepwalking and iron deficiency, so she secretly drizzles fresh human blood from her own hand over Ana's spaghetti. I don't know if that's a normal reaction. Ana loves the spaghetti, though.

Ragu alla sangue.

Ana recounts a memory to Ana, in which she met a werewolf and shot it, and the whole scene is told through amazing still drawings. The werewolf came shortly after she had sex with a strange cowboy, so it's pretty clear this is a werewolf baby.

Flashbacks should always be storybook drawings.

When her stomach starts pulsing and bulging, it is confirmed that the baby ain't right. It splits her belly right in half, which is an unsurvivable event.

Unless performed in a hospital, which it was not.

A little wolf foetus clamors around on the floor. Clara scoops it up and carries it out to release into the wild while a nearby homeless lady sings us into a horror lullaby. She can't bear to leave a crying baby behind, so she becomes the proud mother of a horrible baby werewolf.

Brazil seems to have loose laws regarding adoption.

Somehow he grows up to be a human-looking boy, played by a kid who is really named Lobo. He has a healthy social life and is a forced vegetarian. He's starting to get quite tempted by his friends' meat dishes at school. Mom has built him a quaint little safety dungeon with wall chains to bind him during full moons, but he doesn't know that this is unusual or necessary. When he finally gets a piece of meat, he becomes violent and rebellious and runs away with his friend to try to find out who his real mom was. Shouldn't have run away on the night of a full moon, though. He's very slow for a wolf, but still fast enough to make it a bad night for his buddy MaurĂ­cio.

Eventually, a classmate is going to inform him his bedtime routine is unusual.

Clara's old landlord sings us another horror lullaby, which is a really nice touch. The landlord sees too much when the wolf comes crawling home, and Clara has to sort her out.

They could probably pass it off as a hair growth disorder.

The boy hasn't learned his lesson, despite murdering his friend, so he locks his mom in the dungeon and flees again. He goes to the school dance, wolfs out on his girlfriend, but his mom shoots him before he can strike. She takes him home to nurse him back to health in his upgraded dungeon.

The townsfolk are very slow to react to a gunshot at a children's party.

The townsfolk figured out what's going on, though, and they go full Frankensteinian lynch mob for the final lullaby.

Which might be justified in this case.