[andrepd]

Having no payoff is the payoff. After everything that's happened to him, he is killed offscreen and his son, now an adult, doesn't even quite remember him.

The journey is the point, basically :) The scenes with the fellow "refugees" are great, insightful glimpses into Brasil, into that 1970s Brasil in particular. They don't need to lead anywhere in particular for me to enjoy it.

That being said, I did like Bacurau and Aquarius more than The Secret Agent. But that speaks more to how incredible those films are.

[zemvpferreira]

Fair enough if you enjoyed it. I'm no stranger to the period or the director's movies and still found this one overly contrived. The tense bits are so engaging that the fantastic/anachronistic felt like it detracted from a great story.

[knuppar]

yeah suddenly perna cabeluda was cool but it did feel a bit random :p

[forinti]

I interpreted it as people making up stories so that they didn't have to face the truth.

Or maybe the newspapers used it to write about things that couldn't be written.

[Qem]

The second option. The military dictatorship had an official censorship bureau in place. Proposed news articles had to be run through it before publishing. When some story was barred, it was usual for journal staff to fill its empty slot with something else, like poems, short stories, tall tales, et cetera, that obviously felt out of place. This way people were made aware something that should be there did not make it.

[greiskul]

And the people attacked in the weird scene are people that tended to just be dissappeared by police. Gay men. Prostitutes.

[knuppar]

> I interpreted it as people making up stories so that they didn't have to face the truth.

That's a very plausible interpretation. I grew up hearing about this myth :p