Neighbouring Sounds

After a series of burglaries on a middle-class Recife avenue, a private security team is hired by the residents—with ominous results. A gripping and expectations-upending slow-burn thriller from Kleber Mendonça Filho, Neighbouring Sounds is one of the first films from Brazil to deal with the clash between the archaic, exploitive class-based society of plantation owners and workers, and the more modern and egalitarian bourgeois society that Brazil has become. It is also superbly constructed, wonderfully acted and luminously filmed.

"Neighbouring Sounds captures the very fabric of Brazilian society, whose seemingly porous hierarchies prove to be prohibitively rigid. It also catches the relationships between servants and employers, the subtleties of race, the perpetuation of privilege, the isolationism of consumerism, and then, in one breathtaking moment, effortlessly incorporates the legacy of Brazil’s dictatorship… All this is achieved thanks to a remarkable editing job by Filho and João Maria, and expert lensing by Pedro Sotero and Fabricio Tadeu. The visuals take full advantage of the widescreen, making the characters seem like figures trapped in a diorama where the street and the apartments are hermetic worlds… Camera angles as well as art direction convey the sense of homes as dwellings barred to keep the unknown out and residents in place, figuratively and literally… Tying it all up is a highly sophisticated use of music and sound."—Jay Weissberg, Variety