The film's earlier scenes binding sensuality and archives, while seeming quirky, have a real psychological pay-off... The film conveys the sense that, while the vulnerability of archives lies in their fragmentation, their power is in being unfinished.

For all its showmanship, exquisite period details and flashy Tarantino-style denouement, Filho’s film never loses its profound emotional ache, or the central idea — that the departing dictatorship left behind an entire population in a state of trauma.

The brilliant thing about it is, it is completely engrossing.

...[Kleber Mendonça Filho ] injects the everyday violence of a corrupt and repressive society with the tension and style of a spy thriller, with flashes of the bizarre and surreal.