The Fall (1976) poster
1976 · drama · social

The Fall

Directed by Nelson Xavier, Ruy Guerra1h 46m1976
ElsewhereIMDb6.8265kRT82%Metacritic73TMDB6.86
  • heavy
  • intense
Movie DNA

Heavy, steady, measured drama / social, grounded in texture. Nihilistic, mid-stakes, cold, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

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An accident at a construction site, resulting in one death, sets one worker off on a struggle for justice that exposes the mechanisms of exploitation and the class relations of a country that had undergone one decade of fast-paced ‘conservative modernisation’ at the hands of the military. As a sort of sequel to the classic The Guns (1964), following the fate of those characters as they move from enforcers of exploitation to exploited, it offers more than a snapshot of the period: the correspondent time lapses in fiction and reality capture the passage of a chunk of Brazilian history between the two films, and, therefore, also the transformations in cinematographic approaches to the social and political between the two moments. Equally daring in content and form, and in the originality of the adequacy of one to the other, it won the Silver Bear at Berlin.

Our read · The Fall (1976) reads as a heavy, steady, grounded drama · social entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, cold in temperature, nihilistic in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

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The shape of The Fall

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What watching it is actually like.

You want fierce Brazilian class-war drama with experimental political filmmaking.

ends bittersweetit stays with yougrabs you earlygrips from the openattention 5/5earns its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upgraphic violenceanimal harmsexual violence

Skip it tonightYou need English dialogue or cannot handle raw workplace and domestic violence.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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