Aparição

Sadly interpreted by a director and actors who didn't understand a bit of the story, reading passages of the book like parrots. Vergílio Ferreira deserved better.

Same problem as with most Portuguese movies: they get the pace all wrong. Some scenes are so unnecessarily long that they feel like the director ran out of ideas and decided to just waste some time. Acting is below par, specially Jaime Freitas. He sends out the gloomy mourning vibe alright, but with awkward dialogue with confusing emotions. I'm fact, dialogue suffers from the same ailment as most Portuguese movies: they're too theatrical, and mostly sound like they're declaiming something rather than interacting with each other. Didn't love the book, movie didn't make me like the story any better.

A movie with too long silences, where people gather but hardly speak, travel in a car full of people while remaining in silence, they don't walk but drag their feet along a path, in summary a movie hard to watch and follow. This has nothing to do with realism or neo-realism, this is just the director's interpretation of how a movie should be done.