‘Property’ Edinburgh International Film Festival 2023 Review: A Brutal Take On Home Invasion
Horror has always been political because violence and terror all occur within deep-set and recognizable power dynamics. Being a hunted, targeted victim or embodying a villainous pursuer both resonate beyond what’s being literally depicted on screen, triggering associations in the audience’s collective cultural memory. Some films, like the Brazilian home invasion thriller Property, just make these links more explicit by telling a story that acknowledges, grapples with, and maybe even subverts the power dynamics that punish so many today.
Even the title Property signals that the genre thrills will interrogate a political concept that has defined and remolded humankind arguably more than any other. The film centers on a wealthy couple whose retreat to their stately country house is disrupted by the laborers on the property’s surrounding farm. In it, social disparities aren’t used as just window dressing—they are the horror’s lifeblood. Writer-director Daniel Bandeira uses the conventions and tensions of genre film to permit its working class, Indigenous, and Black characters an agency and leverage they don’t have access to in mundane reality.
The primary perspective Property aligns with is a surprising but rewarding one. Fashion designer Tereza (Malu Galli) has become a hyper-anxious shut-in after being held at gunpoint by a criminal in a busy city. Her wealthy husband, Roberto (Tavinho Teixeria), has bankrolled a lot of her recovery including security measures, therapy, and an extra-secure, voice-activated, armored car instead of offering patience, support, and emotional availability.
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The car soon becomes a safe room that Tereza locks herself in after the laborers incapacitate Roberto and storm their landlord’s house. After building the tension of something being off inside Tereza and Roberto’s home, Bandeira catches us up on the farmers’ point of view. The property is being turned into a hotel and they have all been made jobless and trespassers. Plus, they still must pay off punishing debts to their employers. Unsurprisingly, violence breaks out, initiated by the unstable, mute Zildo (Anderson Cleber). Realizing they can’t talk their way out of it, the farmers raid the house and try to steal back their papers while also looting the many luxuries visibly and gloatingly on display.
From the moment we meet them, Bandeira makes clear the punishing systems that condition the farmers’ lives. He avoids demonizing characters who will go on to use force to avoid further persecution. To them, violence is a way of asserting power that, should they follow the law, they could never wield. The only way to challenge domestic colonialism is to challenge and remove the authority held by rich, unsympathetic landowners.
But Bandeira doesn’t make his characters’ plight too theoretical. He allows them to be impulsive, reactive, and driven by fierce emotion, none more so than the older Dimas (Samuel Santos), who has had to swallow years of disrespect and belittlement and now has less control over how he expresses it. It’s not that Property wants us to think the farmers’ actions are morally faultless, but instead gives every opportunity to at least empathize with their plight.
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The propulsive, grisly action in Property is truly tremendous. The digital sheen of so many low-budget violent films is perfectly suited to the chaotic and quickly escalating attacks. Galli gives the best “trapped in a car” acting since Dee Wallace in Cujo, with her trauma informing her bitter stubbornness as much as it does her sharpened survival instincts (one telling moment has her blare the car horn repeatedly over a farmer calmly explaining his terms). Property indulges the home invasion film fanatics in the audience by giving us enough inventive escape attempts, with each one shifting the power balance and tension between aggressors and victims.
There are the usual gaps in logic and frustrating common-sense lapses that come with any survival horror, but Property succeeds—and often excels—at what should be gripping and cathartic in this genre. What’s more, with such expansive, confronting ideas behind the action, it’s easier to forgive its slip-ups than in a more generic version of this story.
Beyond the violence, images in the last act stick in the mind as Bandeira calls our attention to the emotional cost of the situation. It ends on a note of sheer brutality, not in what we explicitly see on screen, but in the extremes the subjugated characters are willing to go to. Apart from being a superlative genre thriller, the provocative and deftly handled Property asks us to consider which violence is worse: the type we see in horror films, or the type that systematically suppresses our human value, reducing us into something incapable of voicing resistance.
Summary
Apart from being a superlative genre thriller, the provocative and deftly handled Property asks us to consider which violence is worse—the type we see in horror films, or the type that systematically suppresses our human value
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