Elon Doesn’t Believe in Death is a Brazilian movie released in 2016, directed by Ricardo Alves Jr. It follows a man searching for his missing wife.
Hello, there! I’m dos Santos, and this is Ulven Reviews, with Movies and series from all over the world and all eras. Today we’ll talk about Elon Doesn’t Believe in Death, beginning with a plot summary, through the review, and finishing with a symbolic Rating. Here we go!
Elon (played by Rômulo Braga) is looking all around the city for his missing wife, Madalena (played by Clara Choveaux). That’s it.
The whole movie consists of the back of Elon’s neck going places, usually dark, to look for Madalena. He goes to her work, her friends, family, and even the police.
There’s barely any dialogue. Most of it is Elon asking around for the wife and people responding rudely. By the way, everyone in the movie is rude, even the cop who’s just filling the missing report. Every character is shit, and there’s no one likable in the slightest.
Still regarding the dialogue, there’s lots of unnecessary silence and lack of response. For example, when Elon’s boss questions him about missing so many days of work, he keeps silent and even burps in the boss’s face. Same thing with police inquiry, except for the burping.
Elon is an awful protagonist and a very shitty character. He’s absolutely unlikeable, and there are hints that he was a bad husband as well. He’s so bad that I couldn’t feel any sympathy for his quest.
He appears numb for the most part of the movie. There’s no apparent suffering or any other feeling from him besides his never-stopping search for Madalena. Maybe that was the point the director was trying to make, but it only made me feel even less interested in the film.
I don’t think the problem is in the acting. I don’t remember watching any other work with Rômulo Braga but seeing his resumée on IMDb, we can see he’s aways in high-quality productions that demand an equally capable cast. He probably just didn’t have an opportunity to show his acting in this movie.
I didn’t like Clara Choveaux, however. Both as Jasmin, Madalena’s twin sister, as in the role of Madalena herself, I just felt like there was something off about the performance. It seemed unnatural and distracting.
Talking about distracting shit: there’s a long and unnecessary scene of explicit, unsimulated oral sex, first fellatio and, then, cunnilingus. I’m usually not against sex scenes, but it serves no purpose here, and the unsimulated even less so.
The cinematography is also horrendous. Set almost entirely at night and in dark places like a cheap brothel and houses that never get the lights turned on, the movie is way too dark. The desaturated colors, which I usually appreciate, are too much of a mess. And lastly, I didn’t like the framing at all as well.
The only mildly positive thing I could find is that the movie was set and filmed in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais). It went outside the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro bubble, where the Brazilian movies are usually set and filmed.
From what I could find, the movie’s budget was about one million reais, around 300 thousand dollars in 2015-2016. And it was the director’s full-length debut. These factors have to be considered, but there are not enough excuses in the world for me to like this movie in the slightest.
Elon Doesn’t Believe in Death didn’t captivate me at all. There’s absolutely nothing to like. I was bored and annoyed for the whole duration of the movie, making it one of the worst experiences I have ever had with films. I’ll give Elon Doesn’t Believe in Death 1 Moon A.K.A The Moon of Shit.
That’s it for now.
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Crítica dos Ratos 