The Fever

“The fever comes and goes, like it’s got a timetable” says Justino (Regis Myrupu) in Brazilian filmmaker Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever, confused by the inexplicable affliction that descends upon him when he finds out that his daughter Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto) will be leaving him to study medicine in Brasília.

In the film, which, rather than trying to provide easy answers to the questions it raises, feeds off of a sense of productive indeterminability and ultimate inscrutability, various characters receive callings that they are unable to ignore.

An indigenous migrant worker employed as a security guard at the docks of Manaus, Justino finds himself drifting into dream states when his illness hits, a switch that is not exactly signalled within a film that is tonally hot, hazy and feverish from the get-go, relentless in its impressive generation of mood through aggressively atmospheric sound design from Felippe Mussel, and sharp, sweaty night-time cinematography from Barbara Alvarez.

When called in to discuss his lapsed attention, a HR consultant refers to Justino’s indigeneity as a “condition”, compounding a sense of hostility initiated by his other colleagues’ insistence on referring to him only as “the Indian”. If urbanised modernity is literally making Justino sick, why stay in the city when everyone and everything is telling him to go back to the rainforest?

Over a sombre, muted film that moves slowly and searchingly, as Justino’s situation deteriorates further, the pervasive sense of unease already prevalent in the film is bolstered by background news reports of a dangerous animal running amok in the area, feasting on livestock and evading capture from clueless authorities who are unsure what they are even looking for.

As has been popular with Brazilian cinema in the Bolsonaro era, Da-Rin is working in an allegorical mode, not offering any one heavy-handed message but instead threading out multiple open-ended undercurrents that offer trickles of sublimated meaning.

No reason is given for the cause of the fever, and the creature’s threat mostly remains off-screen, but the use of ambiguity here doesn’t feel like a cover-up as it often can in feature debuts, but instead the sort of sleight of hand that encourages viewers to look beyond the simplistic central narrative and think more about the contexts that inform the story and the backgrounds of the characters inhabiting this world.

Having made several documentaries prior to this first fiction feature, Da-Rin places emphasis on establishing familiarity with the place the story is set and the Desana people with whom it has been constructed. From this real-world research, a slippery, expansive fictitious narrative emerges that blends elements of folklore, history and tradition with a central arc more grounded in the specifics of contemporary lived experience.

Late in the film, when Justino himself pursues the creature, a final pay-off is refused when, after following some unsettling clues that suggest something explosive to come, the trail runs cold. The suggestion is that whilst Justino’s fever may come and go, and should therefore be treatable, the terrible beast that has come calling for him may be harder to tame.