The Riverbank Review: Salvation Comes With Conditions

The baptisms leave Izaquiel with wet floors. For the congregation, immersion promises a new life; for the cleaner, it supplies another task. Enock Carvalho and Matheus Farias keep that practical distinction available throughout The Riverbank, their humid, disquieting feature debut set in Recife. The church requires someone to maintain the physical setting of its spiritual transformations. Izaquiel, played by Caique Copque, can perform that service without being welcome as himself. His employment brings him close to the ritual while leaving his own claim to belonging subject to negotiation.

Luciana Baseggio’s fluorescent church interiors make those negotiations especially uncomfortable. The space is brightly legible, its surfaces apparently free of secrets, yet the pastor’s first concerns include Izaquiel’s earrings and nail polish. These must go.

The dress code is quite precise. Through that instruction, the lighting acquires an ethical function: this institution permits visibility on condition that it can regulate what appears. Its cleaner is asked to remove the small declarations of identity that the illumination would otherwise expose. The compound’s visual order accompanies a demand for bodily obedience.

Robério Diógenes’s pastor offers paternal attention alongside these restrictions, and Izaquiel’s receptiveness gives the arrangement a painful instability. His own father’s hostility leaves an opening for another kind of authority to present itself as care.

Economic precarity helps keep that opening available. Trouble over sexual activity in the toilets at his previous workplace precedes the church job; he has limited room to treat every insult as grounds for departure. Firearms and the reelection ambitions of the pastor’s son gradually make the institution’s interests harder to mistake. Religious authority has acquired both electoral plans and the means to enforce them.

The mangroves initially permit a different relationship between bodies and their surroundings. Here Baseggio works in blue-black darkness, with glints of light allowing figures to emerge before they become fully readable. Mud, water, and the humid textures of Maíra Mesquita’s production design deny the reassuring clarity of the compound.

That uncertainty is erotic. Izaquiel cruises these riverbanks, where a stranger’s partial visibility allows attraction to develop before knowledge catches up. When he meets Jeremias, the fisherman played by Ítalo Martins, the image can offer a desirable body while keeping the man’s intentions obscure. Looking supplies possibilities. It cannot yet supply confidence.

A discovered body and reports of attacks and disappearances change how we inspect those same surroundings. The filmmakers do not need to strip the riverbank of sensuality to make it frightening. Its attractions remain active, which makes the dread harder to compartmentalize. Martins’s physical assurance and enigmatic demeanor give Izaquiel reasons to return and reasons to hesitate.

Copque carries that conflict through the change from darting, exploratory glances to a watchfulness that weighs each encounter. His sexual confidence survives the gathering threat, preventing the performance from reducing Izaquiel to a frightened witness in his own life.

This is where the film’s neo-noir grammar becomes persuasive. Darkness restricts knowledge, but the fluorescent alternative offers no moral security. Suspicion cannot be sorted by exposure. Izaquiel’s friends warn him about returning to the mangroves, and those warnings deserve weight; so does the attachment drawing him back.

The film allows desire to remain a credible motive under dangerous conditions. That matters in a thriller whose victims are targeted for their sexuality. Treating each return as a simple failure of judgment would quietly concede too much to the people making the riverbank unsafe.

The club sequence complicates this geography further. Izaquiel’s trans friends perform a song about men who pursue trans women, vogue, and draw the crowd into their pleasure. Visibility here becomes a collective activity, with performers answering the gaze directed at them.

The sequence gives the film a social energy absent from the tentative exchanges among the mangroves. At home, this chosen family also argues about sex, money, and survival. The ensemble’s ease accommodates friction, allowing solidarity to feel practiced rather than ceremonial. Their care includes objections to Izaquiel’s behavior; affection has not suspended anyone’s judgment.

During a visit to his parents, his mother remarks that she cannot tell firecrackers from gunshots outside. Her uncertainty extends the film’s perceptual unease beyond the cruising ground. An ordinary sound may announce celebration or danger, and the person hearing it lacks the information needed to settle the question.

Alongside the dense, ominous score, such details keep threat present without requiring a succession of shocks. Yet the two-hour construction sometimes holds that state longer than it develops it. The atmosphere remains charged while the dramatic pressure occasionally stops increasing.

Political ambition, corruption, disappearances, and religious coercion accumulate, but their connections are less surprising than the film’s shifting textures. Predictability need not defeat suspense: recognizing a threat can make waiting for its consequences unpleasantly absorbing.

The difficulty comes when another strand confirms the same arrangement of power without substantially changing Izaquiel’s choices or our expectations. The baptism material risks a similar repetition. Its relation to conformity is established clearly enough that further emphasis can feel like renewed instruction. The film’s most assured visual ideas occasionally receive less trust than they deserve.

Its drift toward magical realism and romance takes a more productive risk with genre expectations. Water has already been assigned an official purpose through baptism; Jeremias’s life as a fisherman gives it another, inseparable from work, bodily contact, and the river itself. As intimacy gains weight, the prospect of renewal becomes less dependent on an institution’s permission.

A thriller organized around persecution creates an appetite for retaliation, and Carvalho and Farias leave that appetite unsettled. Izaquiel’s attachment asks for time and attention that the murder plot might otherwise claim. Remaining available to another person becomes a difficult choice in a landscape that keeps teaching him to look for danger.

The Riverbank premiered in international competition at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2026. Co-directed by Matheus Farias and Enock Carvalho, the Brazilian drama-thriller follows a disillusioned cleaner in Recife who seeks nocturnal refuge in the local mangroves, where his life shifts dramatically after meeting a magnetic fisherman.

Full Credits

• Title: The Riverbank (A Margem do Rio)

• Distributor: Vitrine Filmes, MPM Premium

• Release date: August 2026 (Locarno Film Festival)

• Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes (117 minutes)

• Director: Matheus Farias, Enock Carvalho

• Writers: Matheus Farias, Enock Carvalho

• Producers and Executive Producers: Enock Carvalho, Flavia Oertwig

• Cast: Ítalo Martins, Caique Copque