Warning: This article contains spoilers for Good Manners, mentions of pregnancy and death by childbirth, mentions of animal death and child death, and mentions of racism.

Staying in last week’s vein of international horror films with queer women at their center, this week I watched an entry from Brazil known as Good Manners or As boas maneiras. Unlike The Handmaiden, though, I hesitate to describe Good Manners as a “lesbian film.” Not because it doesn’t have queer women in it — it most certainly does — but more because Good Manners takes a romance between two women as a jumping off point for its queerness. It then extends it in a completely different direction in the second half of the film.

Also, I want to say right off the bat: one of these two women dies, rather graphically. While her death isn’t exactly about her identity as a woman attracted to other women, there aren’t necessarily many reviews that will tell you the women don’t end up together. I get it, they wanted to avoid spoiling the movie’s core conceit. However, I’m not writing a review, and I am glad to have entered this movie without expecting a tidy resolution to what at first glance might look like a lesbian baby drama. As I’m sure many of us here can attest, I have been around too many times to sit through a movie hoping for one thing — namely, a “queer endgame ship” that’s actually written with care and respect — only to be slapped sharply in the face by something else entirely.

Good Manners has been described as two movies in one, and I’m inclined to agree. It opens on an exploration of a complex, racially and economically fraught relationship between a 5 months pregnant, seemingly wealthy white Brazilian woman known as Ana, played by Marjorie Estiano and a financially struggling black Brazilian lesbian woman known as Clara, played by Isabél Zuaa. While none of the characters in the film explicitly mention these disparities as such, they very much pervade the text. Because of that I think it’s worth giving a brief précis of the backdrop here. It’s been a while since I graduated, and longer still since I studied this aspect of Brazilian history, but I’ll do my best to summarize it effectively and without missteps.

The history of Brazilian race relations, particularly from about the 1930s onward due to the writings of sociologist GIlberto Freyre (1900-1987), has often been framed through the idea of a “racial democracy.” This idea was a counterargument to prevailing scientific racism among Brazilian intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Moving away from the pervasive idea that “mixing of the races” had been a barrier to Brazil’s development, Freyre instead posited that this was “testament to the achievements of a Brazilian civilization that had encouraged a pattern of tolerant race relations that was unique in the world.” The suggestion, in essence, was that Brazil had had no violent racism in its history, and that its race relations were more peaceful and progressive than those, for instance, in Europe or North America.

This narrative, as has been pointedly challenged multiple times by more recent analyses of Brazilian race relations, is a tidy myth. It summarily ignores Brazil’s historical involvement in the slave trade, just as much as it ignores the targeted policies of immigrant recruitment that sought to encourage “whitening” of the country and associating that whiteness with higher class and cultural “advancement”. Though commonplace discourse about race in Brazil has largely moved away from the “racial democracy” myth since, we can nonetheless see its ramifications still being played out between Ana and Clara. The echoes of a longstanding history of inequality, discrimination, and white coopting of black bodies and lives persist in this relationship, and butt heads with the growing romantic tension between the two.

With that understanding in place, let’s return to the plot. Clara, struggling to make ends meet and keep up with the demands of her overbearing landlord, Dona Amelia, applies for a job as a nanny, though she has no particular references to offer and has been unable to complete her nursing education. In the first of many perhaps implicit but nonetheless hard to avoid comments on power disparities and racial dynamics in Brazil, Clara is instructed to take the “service elevator” up to her interview. This is essentially making her use a separate entrance from the accepted (white) residents of the high-end condo building. Initially,

Ana is reluctant to hire her — not least because (just before Clara entered) she had just interviewed an “ideal” or rather white, qualified, financially secure, and put together candidate. Said candidate isn’t shy to condescend to Clara on her way out. Still, it isn’t long before Ana clocks that Clara is financially vulnerable, and decides to test the waters. She says she will need a live-in caregiver and maid until such time as the baby is born. She watches Clara closely to see if her lack of options and financial precarity will lead her to take the proverbial bait, despite that being no part of the original job posting.

Which, indeed, Clara does; though she maintains her apartment in her own neighborhood as well, it’s not long before she moves in with Ana full time. Their relationship shifts back and forth between a tensely unequal dynamic between employer and employee. This is further complicated by stark divides of race and class, and an uneasy friendship interspersed with ambiguous flirtation.

The tension comes to what appears to be a head on Ana’s birthday, when she brushes aside Clara’s concerns that she’s been drinking beer, and begins to flirt with her in more direct earnest. In the same sequence, Ana finally divulges to Clara how she came to be alone with her pregnancy. She admits that she slept with someone who wasn’t her ex-fiance. On top of that, when she refused to abort the pregnancy, her family cut her off and her ex-fiance posted a statement shaming her on his social media, thus cutting her off from many of her friends as well.

Realizing that she’s become maudlin, though, Ana apologizes and changes the subject quite abruptly, by setting herself into Clara’s lap without warning and pulling her in for a selfie. Clara — guided by Zuaa’s remarkable quiet expressiveness and internality — is visibly startled, even uncomfortable, and very much aware of the power differential between them. However, in the same moment she evokes a fragile, simmering intrigue or attraction, and her inability or unwillingness to act on it.

The following day, Clara accompanies Ana to her ultrasound and checkup. While there, she’s given advice about Ana’s care and diet going forward, particularly the need to cut meat out of her diet. They also acquire a home ultrasound machine, leading to a scene that brings a new tenderness to the forefront of the relationship.

Things are unavoidably still fraught due to the power differentials at play, but in the absence of any paternal figure to the child, Clara is privy to a lot of the intimate moments that might have happened differently had there been any presence of a man in Ana’s life. This scene, in particular, hinging on a long moment of eye contact and touching hands, brings about a turning point in the relationship from ambiguously flirtatious to unavoidably charged. It also begins to pull on a recurring thread, one that queries and challenges what a family is “supposed” to look like.

However, Ana finally pulls away, cutting the moment short. Clara draws back in turn, ultimately asking if Ana needs anything else, as she is going out for the night. With confirmation Ana will be fine on her own, Clara heads out to what we soon learn is a lesbian bar. This is both the first explicit confirmation of Clara’s sexuality, and an implicit indication that she does, in fact, want Ana’s company in a romantic and/or sexual sense. Of course, the remaining differential in their relationship makes it implausible to pursue it. However, when Clara is flirted with by another woman at the bar, she doesn’t take long to turn her down, claiming that she has to go home.

Clara returns to Ana’s condo from the bar to find Ana seemingly sleepwalking, stubbornly searching the fridge for meat that Clara had previously thrown out in keeping with the doctor’s instructions. As Clara tries to guide Ana back to bed, Ana instead turns to her, breathing in her scent, nuzzling at and scratching her skin, eventually kissing her almost aggressively on the mouth. After the initial shock, Clara is warmly responsive — but only until Ana bites her lip, at which point Clara flinches away, hurt and bleeding. The camera then pans to a newly yellow-eyed Ana with blood dripping from her mouth.

The next day, we see Clara recovering from the night’s events, with a bloody scratch mark at the join of her neck and shoulder. Spoiler time: Ana’s pregnancy isn’t “normal.” Though neither Clara nor Ana seem to know exactly what’s happening yet, it’s worth revealing here. Interestingly, Good Manners does away with the usual “if you get scratched or bit by a werewolf you become one” lore.

This is perhaps because Ana isn’t a full werewolf, and is simply pregnant with one, but it’s striking given the movie’s filmic techniques. As much as Good Manners borrows musical cues, stage settings and other filming aspects from movies that would have been produced under the Hays Code, this movie abandons that era’s tendency to inscribe queer vampirism or queer lycanthropy through the lens of sexually transmitted disease and “corruption.” Ana, however, does lean into familiar tropes of the “amnesiac werewolf,” who seems to have no memory of her behavior the previous night.

Clara, combining the realization that Ana doesn’t remember kissing or biting her with the general unsettling nature of her new situation, withdraws into herself, Ana clearly doesn’t understand why she’s being newly distant and continues pressing her, though, asking if she had fun at the bar. Clara responds, that it was “A bit expensive, I thought. But it’s a beautiful place.” Maybe I’m reaching here, but it’s a line — and delivery — that lends itself to thinking she might be talking about Ana more than about the bar itself.

Despite this pulling away, though, the following night, Clara is woken by unexpected sounds from Ana’s room and rushes to check on her. There, she finds Ana recovering from a nightmare, in which, she explains, her teeth were all falling out, and she was in the woods digging an endless hole to bury them in. The allegory — for those who know, or have guessed, that Good Manners is in many ways a “secret werewolf movie” — for both lycanthropy and pregnancy is clear. It mirrors them in the sense of dramatic bodily changes, but the werewolf’s bodily transformation has been analyzed through a queer lens before, too. It evokes a “hybrid” selfhood that challenges and denies straightforward binaries of gender and sexuality.

This reading is something that, Good Manners’ screenwriters were probably aware of when they picked the werewolf to be the center of their film. As Juliana Rojas explained in an interview, “We started to investigate the werewolf folklore in different cultures and saw how the myth usually relates to impulses of violence and sex, and also to religious and conservative values.” It’s an interpretation that soon moves from the implicit to the explicit, as Clara’s physically tactile efforts to calm Ana and guide her back into sleep, or at least rest, soon enough take a turn into the movie’s first, and indeed only, sex scene.

As ever, I was bracing for something that would either be bizarrely prudish or tasteless and titillating for men. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was neither. There’s no question that it was erotic, and not really hiding much, but it was as much an emotional intimacy as it was a physical one. Most of the shots were focused on our leads’ faces, and the sex acts we did see felt … you know, natural, and real. Not like ideas just borrowed from porn for straight guys.

Not that this fixes everything, though; later that same night, Ana once again stirs to sleepwalk, and Clara carefully follows her this time, to see where she goes. The trip ends down a side street off a nearby park, where Ana captures (and promptly eats) a local cat, in an unconscious but desperate attempt to feed herself and her child the meat that has been cut completely from her diet. There’s a fairly straight — no pun intended — line to draw, at this point, between the full moon and Ana’s more unfettered sexual and violent impulses.

Interpretations may vary here as to what that means for her relationship with Clara, new as it is, but something has definitely shifted between them come the following afternoon. Clara, for her part, is clearly rattled by the experience, but — in a move that may require a little suspension of disbelief — instead of fleeing, she decides to verify what she saw by cutting her palm and sprinkling some of her own blood into Ana’s lunch. Ana, indeed — again, no pun intended — wolfs it down, delighted, prompting Clara to start telling her the truth about the sleepwalking.

It also leads her to show Ana the scratch injury sustained earlier in the film. Ana is appropriately dismayed and confused by this revelation. It may be debatable though how much she actually knows or doesn’t know about what’s going on with her and her pregnancy by this time. She still seems to have no memory of the previous night’s events, but I think this is the first moment that really provides two perhaps equally viable readings of the film.

There’s one interpretation where Ana is fully aware of what’s going on and is playing ignorant to keep Clara nearby and involved with her; and another where she truly has no idea. In the second interpretation, it’s the genuine vulnerability each woman feels in confronting this boggling, impenetrable situation that brings them closer together. I don’t even know which one I buy into, as I can see both. For anyone who watched this movie — either before or after reading this article — I’d be very curious to know what you thought.

True enough, though, Clara and Ana’s relationship isn’t necessarily as sexually charged when we see them in the light of day, or during periods when the moon isn’t full, which does speak to the lunar cycle having something to do with the relaxing of Ana’s inhibitions. Still, I think we’ve all seen enough coming out movies that have gotten kickstarted by someone having an initial queer experience while under the influence of alcohol. Because of that, I don’t think it’s really indicative of much other than the fact that Ana might not have let herself consider the fact that she might be attracted to women until now.

In any case, the relationship between our two leads becomes increasingly tender from this point on, with plenty of casually emotive touching and kissing for comfort and stability. It should be said, though, that it’s a little hard to ignore that Clara seems to be giving a lot more than she gets out of the relationship, even now. The inequalities that characterized the beginning of their relationship are hard to surpass. Ana is comfortable in a status quo that she hasn’t been willing to question and Clara struggles to surmount it, and it shows.

Nonetheless, we soon uncover the full truth of how Ana became pregnant, and — if anyone hadn’t guessed it already — the nature of the child. She finally relates to Clara a story of sleeping with another man, Jorge Mario, shortly before she was due to be married. When she woke up, he was nowhere to be seen, but there was a large wolf nearby her car; almost reflexively, she shot and wounded it before it fled. When she realized she was pregnant, she tried to find Jorge Mario again, but turned up no sign of him. However, the audience soon learns that he was a priest in a nearby town.

This, too, makes for an interesting turn on the way that werewolves — and vampires — were framed in the Hays Code era of film. The (typically Catholic) priest is usually called upon to exorcise, save, or kill the “monster” in question. Here, though, the threat to Ana — to her identity, her sexuality, and her bodily autonomy — is the priest, which is a thread that recurs later on in a different form. Indeed, it’s not long after this that Ana goes into a premature, and very painful, labor, while Clara is out of the house getting groceries. When Clara returns, she hears Ana’s pained screams from upstairs and rushes to her side, but arrives too late. The infant werewolf is born, having clawed and torn his way out of her stomach. Ana falls still after Clara kisses her for a final time, knowing she is past saving.

Once Ana has died, Clara shakily takes Ana’s gun into hand and prepares to kill the newborn werewolf, but is unable to do so as she realizes the infant is struggling to breathe with the umbilical cord knotted around his neck. She carefully removes it, but then tries to abandon the infant to his death on a river bank off the side of the road as she flees the scene of Ana’s death. Hearing him cry, though, she caves a second time and comes back for him, bringing him with her into the poorer area of São Paulo in which she was living at the beginning of the movie. This leads into the second half of the story.

There is, at this point, a fairly significant tonal shift. While there are certainly parts of the movie that are still frightening, the focus becomes less on the threat and the simmering presence of fear, and moves more toward the newly complicated family dynamic. In fact, an early scene in this half of the film that probably would feel frightening or unsettling in another movie, feels more tender and intimate than anything. The emphasis has shifted from the queer love between two women, to the love between a lesbian adoptive mother and her “unusual” child.

In this early scene, Clara struggles to soothe the crying — and, I should say, surprisingly adorable — werewolf pup, until she realizes he’s hungry. While she has no milk to offer him, she nonetheless chooses to breastfeed him, allowing him to bite her and draw blood, after which he calms. We’ve seen this trope played differently in other movies, where a mother goes to feed her seemingly “normal” baby only to be shocked when the baby bites her.

Here, it’s the inverse, where the willing sharing of blood becomes an expression of care and intimacy. More specifically, an intimacy that furthermore completely severs the act of breastfeeding from the state of biological motherhood, turning the “norm” of family and childrearing almost entirely on its head. In other words, then, Good Manners exchanges one queer love story for another — this time between mother and child.

The film then jumps forward seven years in time, as we see that Clara has raised our young werewolf, Joel (Miguel Lobo), into a cute, somewhat mouthy but overall seemingly well-adjusted seven year old. Interestingly, she looks more femme than she had in the first half of the film. While there’s no explicit acknowledgment of this change, it may speak to an effort to pass herself off as a more socially “acceptable” guardian to a young white boy and to dissuade questions about how she came to adopt him.

Still, Clara is also more lively and warmly expressive than she’d been previously, too, with more of an exteriority. She seems genuinely happy with her life despite the grief and loss that brought it about. A sense of self-actualization in her life as a single queer mom is visible, even if she’s the only one who knows. She has also been able to complete her nursing qualifications, working as a well-respected and well-liked nurse within her neighborhood.

Of course, not everything is hunky-dory. Raising a werewolf child is still riddled with challenges, not least when Clara has, as we soon learn, deliberately and carefully tried to keep the circumstances of his birth and nature from him. She raises him vegetarian — telling him he’s allergic to meat — and makes sure he doesn’t leave their house on or around the full moon, going so far as to chain him up in a separate, locked room on those four nights of each month. When Joel asks her if he might go to a dance in the town square with his classmates on the Friday of that week, Clara reminds him that Friday is still during the full moon period, and tells him that it’s “little-bedroom night.”

While, initially, Joel is fairly compliant with these terms, if somewhat reluctantly, it’s not much of a surprise when these restrictions eventually backfire. As tender and loving as Clara is with him, making his “little bedroom” as comfortable as she can, and shaving Joel’s body and trimming his claws each morning, kids his age are liable to rebel. Which is especially the case if they don’t fully understand the rules that have been set.

Lo and behold, Joel finds the photo of Ana that Clara had been keeping hidden away, and realizes — because they look alike — that she must be his biological mother. Having been unwittingly fed meat by Dona Amelia earlier in the day, he confronts Clara, newly aggressive and angered at the deception. Clara tells him that Ana died giving birth to him, but this explanation does little to appease him, and he grows angrier, protesting that he won’t eat Clara’s vegetarian food anymore, that she’s not his mother, and that he’s done with the “little bedroom.”

In what is probably a familiar look to anyone with a kid — or, for that matter, a significantly younger sibling — Clara, in turn, loses her patience. She insists that she is his mother, and eventually bodily carries him into the “little bedroom,” to essentially leave him in “time out” in there until he calms down. Despite these efforts, though, Joel lashes out and scratches Clara, causing her to flee and lock him in the room, so she can go confront Dona Amelia about what happened while she was out at work.

Later, Clara and Joel seem to strike a fragile truce, as Clara tells him more about Ana. This brings the audience back into the shifted lens of the tenderness, where Clara’s affection for Ana is still very much present in her affection for Joel, as she explains, “She liked to dance. Like you. And she was beautiful. Like you are.”

This only provides a temporary reprieve, though, as Joel acts out a second time after school the following day. Having found a clue among Clara’s belongings that he thinks will lead him to his biological father, Joel enlists his classmate and friend Mauricio to accompany him to the mall to look. It proves to be a dead end, but the two boys stay in the mall well past closing hours, blissfully ignorant to the fact that their parents are increasingly worried by their absence on the other side of town.

Of course, this is still during the full moon, and … let’s just say things don’t end very well for Mauricio. What’s interesting in this sequence is another filmic technique used; the camera’s perspective shifts to put us, the audience, at the level and in the direction of what Joel is seeing. By placing us essentially “in” Joel’s body, it brings home the sympathetic — even empathetic — response to our child werewolf even in a moment where he commits his first real act of violence in the film. It positions us to want to root for him and his mother in the remaining moments of the story.

Joel does, eventually, return home in one piece, though he is exhausted and with blood smeared around his mouth. Dona Amelia, who has been sitting up with Clara as they frantically wait and search, sees Joel’s true nature for the first time, and immediately insists that they should have baptized him when Clara took him in. Clara flatly rejects the suggestion out of hand, but Dona Amelia insists on calling the priest; returning the exterior presence of the Catholic priest as the impending threat to the queered love story that makes up this half of the film’s focal point. Cutting Dona Amelia off as she tries to place the call, Clara is able to sedate her for long enough that she can deal with Joel on her own.

The following morning, Clara tells Joel in no uncertain terms that they are leaving São Paulo, and she has already packed their belongings. Joel — unsurprisingly — resists, and though we know his proneness to losing his temper is a product of his ongoing struggles with his lycanthropy, it looks hardly any different from an argument I’ve seen between parent and child half a hundred times. Protestations of “Why?” and “I hate you!” are inescapably familiar, and it quickly becomes clear that the werewolf-related aggression is pretty much a narrative vehicle for fairly standard prepubescent independence-seeking and intense emotions.

Thus, the movie doesn’t just establish that Clara and Joel’s queer family structure has no room for, nor anything to do with, men, straight people, or “conventional” reproduction. It takes this one step further, solidifying that their family shape changes absolutely nothing about Clara’s experience as mother and Joel’s experience as child, and what that means for their relationship to each other. The argument escalates, then seems to ease off, until it’s revealed that Joel has lulled Clara into a false sense of security so he can act out for the third and final time, locking her into the “little bedroom” so he can run off to the dance, despite her forbidding him from attending. This structure obviously mirrors that of fairytales — bringing home the horror-fairytale genre mash-up of the film, if it wasn’t obvious already — and, to no great surprise, it ends in near-catastrophe.

Joel begins his transformation just before the students’ dance is supposed to start, and nearly attacks a young girl from his class, Amanda. He is narrowly stopped when Clara is finally freed and finds him, where she shoots him non-fatally in the hind leg, and quickly takes him home in a covered wheelbarrow, hoping to escape notice.

It is, of course, too late, as Amanda has seen him transform, and — terrified — has informed all her neighbors at the dance of what she saw. As Clara chains Joel up so that he’ll stay still long enough to clean and bandage his wound, they finally, finally come to a mutual understanding and acceptance as she sings to him. This is just in time for a quite literal mob with torches and pitchforks to start advancing on their house. Just as their neighbors break in and start approaching the little bedroom door behind which Clara and Joel have taken refuge, they take their new-found acceptance and understanding, and stand together to face off against the “angry villagers.”

In the end, it’s unclear whether or not they survive, as the shot cuts to black before the mob bursts in on them, but that isn’t really the point. They’re together, seeing and acknowledging each other, and finding strength in their queered family model and “unconventional” mother-child love story. One of the recurring comments in reviews of Good Manners is that its runtime was too long, so I won’t drag this out any longer, either. All I’ll say is this movie is a lot more heartening and warming than I expected it to be. If you’re after a fresh take on werewolf mythology and an earnest exploration of varied love and family structures, and you have about two hours to spare, give it a watch

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