The Blue Trail review – hypnotic tale of older-people rebellion in the Amazon in chilling dystopian fable

A cross between road movie and sci-fi, this is a subversive and bittersweet story about a 77-year-old who refuses to be shipped off to a ‘colony’

Gabriel Mascaro’s wayward, intriguing feature is a kind of road movie, or maybe river movie – the Amazon, in fact, in Brazil’s remote north-west.

It is a film that follows its nose, meandering across land and water, wonderfully shot with fascinating visual compositions.

There are occasional weird resemblances to https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2009/jul/03/werner-herzog-fitzcarraldo">Fitzcarraldo or The African Queen, but filmic allusions are not the point.

This is a drama which contrives to transform and liberate its elderly heroine with a series of encounters and vignettes; it is a film about escape and maybe the film itself escapes generic classification, though it’s a problem that disparate ideas and characters are left undeveloped.

On one level, we have a chilling dystopian nightmare about a future society that pretends to value its older citizens by compelling them to leave their homes and live in special “colonies”, a low-cost gerontocidal warehousing of everyone over 75.

They are sometimes transported in a special prison vehicle for errant oldsters nicknamed the “wrinkle wagon” – like a dog-catcher’s van – and when they finally have to board the coach taking them to these “colonies” they are issued with humiliating, compulsory adult diapers.

But on another level, it is a more realist drama about the way society patronises and erases older people.