Between two English-language films – the period drama Firebrand and the forthcoming Rosebush Pruning (noticeably absent from this year’s Cannes, where the filmmaker is a regular) – Karim Aïnouz managed to squeeze in a feature shot in his native Brazil, the first in a thematic trilogy: Motel Destino, an erotic thriller more invested in the erotic than the thriller part. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t keep you on the edge of your seat for its two-hour runtime, but the thriller premise introduced at the start is half-abandoned in favour of an erotic cat-and-mouse game between the three protagonists, only to be revisited now and then to give the narrative engine a new jolt.

Broadly speaking, the film borrows its plot from James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice: a broke, down-on-his-luck young man (Heraldo) ends up working at a roadside motel in exchange for a place to stay, only to fall for the owner (Dayana), who wants to rid herself of her abusive husband (Elias) so they can be together – and take over the business in the process. After all, love alone won’t fill an empty stomach, as Heraldo asks her to run away with him into the wide world. However, our hero is more than the middle-class protagonist of a tropical neo-noir: orphaned alongside his brother, he was taken in by Bambina, the artistically inclined leader of a drug-dealing gang. And unlike James M. Cain’s protagonist, Heraldo – like Dayana – has his own demons to contend with.

He first arrives at Motel Destino for a one-night stand. After a wild romp in the glow of red neon lights, he falls asleep only to wake up robbed by his evening conquest. With nothing to pay for the room, he leaves his ID and rushes off to earn his freedom with one last deal before heading to São Paulo: he must recover, at all costs, a fortune owed to Bambina by a Frenchman. But he is too late; the deal went wrong, and he finds his older brother shot dead. He doesn’t even get the chance to grab his gun for revenge before learning Bambina already has men hunting him down. Now a fugitive, he returns to retrieve the ID he needs to leave the city, but instead decides to go into hiding at the motel for a while.

Heraldo is haunted by nightmares, blaming himself for his brother’s death and fearing he’ll be found. On a few occasions, the nightmares almost become reality when he nearly crosses paths with one of Bambina’s goons. Yet Jorge’s death and its fallout turn out to be more of a MacGuffin. “Danger is good. Adds a little spice,” Dayana tells Heraldo at one point – and that’s exactly what the script does: it spices up a film otherwise driven by the tension between the three characters: will they or won’t they? Because once at the motel, it’s not just Dayana, pushed to her limits, who starts flirting with the young man in his prime, but also her husband – perhaps even more aggressively so.

As in Passages (dir. Ira Sachs, 2023) – co-written by Mauricio Zacharias, who also co-wrote Motel Destino – both characters vie for Heraldo’s attention. But here the stakes are more dangerous (Elias, a volatile ex-cop played with menacing charm by Fábio Assunção, simmers like a powder keg ready to blow), the sex more frequent, and the characters more desperate. So it’s lust that drives the plot forward (Dayana’s proposition to eliminate her husband doesn’t come until well into the third act). Still, no one could accuse the film of a voyeurism à la Abdellatif Kechiche. Even when it gets close enough to the characters’ faces to make you feel like an intruder, Hélène Louvart’s camera maintains a clinical curiosity, more interested in capturing facial expressions and mapping the body – Motel Destino manages to be sexy without being lewd.

Where Motel Destino truly excels is in crafting a sensory atmosphere that you only realise you’ve been immersed in once it fades. The tactile texture of the frame, bathed in pulsing neons and warm pastels, confirms Louvart as one of today’s most interesting cinematographers (besides Aïnouz, she also works frequently with Alice Rohrwacher and Eliza Hittman). And while visually entrancing – especially in a sea of films that have forgotten what vibrant color is and opt instead for washed-out tones – Motel Destino is at least as interesting to listen to: Amine Bouhafa’s experimental score is paired with a soundscape humming with detail that gets under your skin (ecstatic moans from the adjoining rooms, sizzling lights, crickets chirping, the ocean breeze rustling through dry palm leaves).

If there’s anything to criticise about Motel Destino, it’s the deus ex machina ending – though even that is somewhat redeemed, partly thanks to a brief Lynchian moment that precedes it, and partly because the situation is so absurd you can’t help but go along with it. “Some people you just can’t get out of your head. They stay there, etched in…,” says Bambina at the end, speaking of Heraldo while painting him from memory in one of her surreal works. The same could be said of some films.

Motel Destino opens in Romanian cinemas on May 9, distributed by Bad Unicorn.

Laurențiu Paraschiv

Co-programmer of TIFF and BIDFF. Slightly obsessed with Billy Wilder and Paul Thomas Anderson. When he's not watching films and TV or spends his time on Letterboxd, he dreams of his own scripts.