Quarta Divisão
An above average cop thriller, slightly dinged by too much activism in several fronts. On one hand they follow the “show, don’t tell” maxim, but then try to cram two separate scourges of society in a single plot.
The main activist target is domestic violence, particularly against women (the vast majority). This has some numbers from 10 years ago and the evolution is positive, even though murdering 2 woman a month is still a tragedy. Even with a growing societal consensus on this matter (with upper echelon exceptions: Neto de Moura).
Crammed halfway is a treatise about the scandal that rocked public life in Portugal during shooting (with ripples until now), the Casa Pia affair.
Both themes suffer with this. No need to bite more they can chew, the entire plot already revolves around domestic violence.
The rest of the film the standard parts. Da Chief removes our hero’s badge and gun. Jurisdiction friction with the criminal police. She doesn’t drop the case even when directly ordered to.
Finally, it comes to light the paedophilia accusation is false. She gets exculpatory evidence, showing our antagonist has “just” beaten his wife for decades, but never sexually abused his son. She just destroys that evidence, letting sleeping dogs lie.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.