Exploring the Unseen: A Look Inside the Blue Horizons of Berlinale 2025

In The Blue Trail, there’s a very prominent cameo by a hallucinogenic snail. With the film heretofore grounded in naturalism, despite its highly speculative backdrop, the crucial appearance of this rare shelled animal brings the film into a truly fantastical realm, where its slime - absorbed like eyedrops - can induce visions of your future. Still, that it brushes aside the paradox of free will  - in other words, how the people who see the visions will respond, knowing the apparent outcome - encapsulates the slightly unsatisfying air this film has.

Directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Gabriel Mascaro - who first won attention with the far edgier Neon Bull in 2015 - The Blue Trail encases a story of later-life becoming against a gnarled and heightened depiction of recent Brazil’s far-right turn. The 77-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg) is a cleaner minding her own business in a rural part of Brazil, when she suddenly becomes targeted by the country’s authoritarian laws restricting the rights of older people. She must give up her home and job, become completely financially controlled by her daughter Joana (Clarissa Pinheiro) - who gets a pay-off of her own - and prepare for deportment to an ominously secluded colony, where care of this demographic sector can supposedly relieve pressure on the state’s resources.

So, for Mascaro, Tereza unambiguously becomes a hero, exploring Brazil’s new byways and underground economy as she flees to a less monitored part of the country. The Amazon river becomes her open road of possibility, first through the grubbily handsome boater Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro), who first introduces her to the mystical snail, and then the cannily fraudulent evangelical Roberta (Miriam Socarrás), who’s of an age where she’s similarly vulnerable to the state’s power. Commanding a grand sea vessel herself, Roberta preaching the evangelical gospel makes her a desirable civic actor (and she has another means of leverage, that she keeps concealed until a late moment), and Tereza shows a canniness, and gains amazing fortune from her natural fight-or-flight reactions, that’s surprising given her personality at the film’s start.

Still, there’s something a bit easy and gentle overall about The Blue Trail, where we can be unconvinced resisting a fascist dystopia is possible with a little bit of sentimental pluck, and through identifying with a character who’s less complex and real than she seems.

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The customary international premiere in the festival’s competition, launching initially in Sundance, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You brings forth some liveliness and wiliness, even if its scope and some of its ideas are narrow.

Returning to directing features after a 17 year break, Bronstein is part of the influential Safdie brothers stable that’s enlivened hip new American filmmaking, and that team has used the enormous clout they gained after Uncut Gems to get several equally idiosyncratic projects off the ground. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’s filmmaker is the partner of this group’s key member Ronnie Bronstein, whose 2007 micro-budget feature Frownland inaugurated the nervily stressful style they’re famed for.

This feature sways from being quite harrowing to more breezily comic. Rose Byrne - in a more dramatically toned role for a change - is the therapist Linda, whose daughter (Delaney Quinn) is struggling with a complex medical ailment, employing a treatment whereby she eats mainly through a food tube at night. Linda, whose high competence in her job as a counsellor isn’t in any way ironised by her own challenging personal life, is put on a virtual obstacle course by Bronstein where she has to contend with a mysterious flood in her home and the ensuing displacement to a down-heel motel, her daughter’s inconsistent and worrying reactions to the treatment regimen, and the already stressful and triggering nature of her job.

Shot in widescreen close-ups, typically on Byrne’s quite beautiful visage as she’s forced to give venomous backtalk to various interlocutors, the film has an exhilarating senes of momentum, that buries more subtle truths about the oft-futile task of coping with modern existence. As said, the flaw is its occasional conceptual narrowness, and occasionally repetitive and cramped structure, where Bronstein’s main script idea is to subject Linda to a barrage of indignities with little respite. Still, this was the competition’s purest shot of adrenaline.