The Riverbank Review | Nocturnal Erotic Slow-Burn Snakes Through Recife’s Mangrove Forests

Premiering in main competition at the Locarno Film Festival 2026, Matheus Farias and Enock Carvalho’s The Riverbank (A Margem do Rio) pulses with dark, tropical atmosphere, a heated, shivering bundle of racy desire and cavernous menace. It buzzes with this strange, scary, sinister and sensuous personality of its own, aware of the subterranean networks of power undergirding desire. The filmmakers thrust us in Brazil’s Recife, a city recently on vivid display in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Cannes winner and Oscar-nominated breakout, The Secret Agent. Farias himself co-edited the Wagner Moura starrer that took a heady dive into Recife’s past. The Riverbank situates Recife in a stealthy stream of intrigue, deception and intoxicating seduction.

Izaquiel (Caique Copque) is a cleaner who often surrenders to his straying desire, much to the displeasure of his employers. The opening section is cheeky as queer desire claims its articulation in secret corners, an unspoken language of knowing glances. Copque has a brilliant hold over how queerness travels its own path, unbidden and lashing with special, fearless velocity. It’s all about the little, darting cues in a space that we pick on. Izaquiel rambles through the mangrove forests, a site glimmering with feverish erotic possibility. It doubles as an active cruising zone. In one of the outings, he comes across Jeremias (Ítalo Martins), whose naked bulky physique pulls and entices. The latter has this twinkle in his eyes that’s hard to ignore and look past. The seemingly one-off encounter is interrupted when a dead body gets discovered. The air spikes with fear. The forest, as the film unravels, conceals a slew of ghastly secrets. Farias and Carvalho seize onto this bristling recognition of the fraught grid within which sexuality is cast, its free movement curtailed.

Jeremias has ignited a flare of curiosity, a surge of throbbing attraction in Izaquiel. Desire is combustible, nakedly ferocious thing. Transgressive desires are acutely acquainted with the danger they have to weave through. Yet, they launch forth, tremulous but unhesitant. Desire charts its own course, disrupting in the way only it can.

The Riverbank is an expertly calibrated probing of the collision between faith and desire, especially those errant yearnings that refuse to be straitjacketed. This is a drama that glimpses the night as both a time of refuge and grave danger. The filmmakers toggle between the two in unpredictable, disconcerting ways. We can’t quite tell when one will skid into the other. This glues well into the narrative lurches circling Izaquiel’s unravelling, mounting rage. He is helplessly drawn towards Jeremias. Their connection seems almost fated, spun from chance encounters that eventually takes on intentionality.

The Riverbank finds its edge in these nocturnal oscillations. Recife’s mangrove forests, a cruising spot, come thrillingly alive with Luciana Baseggio’s glinting camerawork fusing the carnal with a dash of the mysterious. Figures emerge as if from thin air, an explosive combination of allure, possibility and life’s unmapped horizon. The film taps this atmosphere with a mix of fugue and electricity. There’s a subtle volatility charging underneath this drama where brutality is wordlessly doled out, condoned and enabled. Izaquiel comes to terms with the sobering intensity of the real stakes he must negotiate. He might skirt the inevitable for long, draw it out, but when confronted with incipient personal loss, he’s stirred beyond measure. Neither is he in sync with his parents, whom he visits once on a blue moon. While his father lashes at him, his mother confesses she can’t tell which noise outside is a firecracker or a gunshot. A single exchange like this reveals not just the family dynamics but the wider social milieu.

The film mottles desire with the interstices of power, what that does when it invades every social structure. It’s often wielded through faith. Using its guise, power forces all to toe the line, flaunting benevolence and conscientiousness as its empowering principle. Religion is a conduit, one of the biggest politicised tools to engineer extremism and draw concrete lines between one and the other. The protagonist lands right in its crosshairs as he stumbles upon an evangelical church’s violence to his abject horror. The religious outfit silently snuffs out sexual dissidents in the dead of night, striking terror. It’s the creeping morbid realisation that shadows the narrative and propels Izaquiel’s fraught journey. Copque brings a watchful pose as situations turn dire.

Izaquiel has never quite lasted anywhere for a significant while, constantly drifting from one gig to the next. Clutching onto jobs has been an elusive affair. When he gets suggested as the janitorial cleaner at a temporary Christian setting, he can initially sense the chafing. His would-be employer doesn’t take kindly to his nail polish, his bearings redolent of a deviant. He doesn’t diminish himself. Neither does he protest outright. He doesn’t have any privilege to do so. But how long can he stay at the peripheries without countering? The Riverbank morphs into how he takes charge, sidling from an ancillary presence to someone who’d defy and make his resistance visible. The film does tend to get formulaic in approaching the baptizing rituals Izaquiel is intensely wary of. But it recovers with its sharp sense of atmosphere. The filmmakers are especially adept at turning the screw, twisting it deep within, gathering the ominous as a layer that settles thick and deep.