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 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.