In Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s A paixão segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector’s highly philosophical prose finds a cinematic rendering that surpasses all expectations. G.H. is a well-off Brazilian sculptor who, one day, encounters a cockroach in her maid’s closet. Following this incident, she descends into unknown regions of her being. The breakdown – a sort of madness, but also a passion in the religious sense – strips all masks, undoes her completely, and leads her to a new experience of life. The film combines the confessional, the experimental and the psychological to achieve an existential horror with echoes of Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).

Set almost entirely in the heroine’s apartment, A paixão segundo G.H. is a stunningly sensorial film with frames and cuts precise as a scalpel, sumptuous camera movements, a constant use of visual distortion, and a sophisticated soundtrack (mixing musical snippets, noises and voice tracks with different densities and textures). Maria Fernanda Cândido – capable of turning the diction of a sentence or the holding of a cigarette into truly cinematic occurrences – offers us an intense, electrifying performance that is the perfect counterpart to the arrested inner journey the film presents.