Vitalina Varela

2019 Directed by Pedro Costa

A Cape Verdean woman navigates her way through Lisbon, following the scanty physical traces her deceased husband left behind and discovering his secret, illicit life.

Vitalina Varela Ventura Lina Varela Manuel Tavares Almeida Francisco dos Santos Brito Imídio Monteiro Marina Alves Domingues João Baptista Fortes Nilsa Fortes Lisa Lopi Benvinda Mendes Emídio Landim Monteiro João Raimundo Monteiro Bruno Brito Varela

124 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Sean Baker 12

Portugal's submission for Best International Feature Film at 2021 Oscars.
Watched Academy Screener
Review by Kristen Yoonsoo Kim ★★★ 2

i’ll get 9 hours of sleep and have a large iced coffee and *still* pass the fuk out during a pedro costa
(i say this with love)
Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 18

"I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theatre. Some films have made me doze off in the theatre, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks." - Abbas Kiarostami
Vitalina Varela is despairing, hyper-slow cinema. To watch this after a weary day crushes the soul. Yet it sticks, burying itself into your darkest contemplations. It is a film of faithless faith, days as dark as the night, and a character sketched entirely by his absence. It is 2 hours of a woman's inner suffering, soaking in secrets and lies, darkness and eventually nothing.
Vitalina Varela passes…
Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★½ 2

As often the case that Pedro Costa makes a film that it's received with similar, repetitive platitudes and hyperbole, like "it's about ghosts" or something, while not necessarily off the mark in terms of quality, this is often what happens when a filmmaker is lucky enough to make a work over several years and not within the traditional film production model (no matter the social/cultural contingent) - it's difficult to translate what's usually 3, 4 times the amount of what's contained in an average film within the same time frame you'd have to write about the average movie. But Vitalina Varela posed a different challenge - or rather, it became harder to write about, because it's the first of Costa's…
Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

Vitalina and her ghost. Haunted places at Lisbon. Cinema makes material a world unseen and finds in them new myths. There isn’t many big emotions in 2019 cinema than the moment at the cemetery when we can see a clear daylight sky.
Review by Ben Nash ★★★★★ 6

“Vitalina is Tom Cruise” - actual thing said by Pedro Costa
Review by josh lewis

passing on a rating because this is my first costa and i understand this is an expansion on his previous works so there's likely context im missing for a better assessment but nonetheless i found the way this tries to recreate a person (and history) through detailed observation of the spaces and people they've left behind in their wake rather moving.
Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★★

you know that moment where you just wake up? and the realities of life haven’t quite sunk in, you’re immersed in the memories of what it was like to be asleep, whatever dreams roamed around in your mind. you’re conscious of your awake self but numb to the world around you, not sure what exactly is real and what is a consequence of the dreams lingering with you. anyway, that’s Vitalina Varela for the entirety of the runtime. watch this movie tired and lose your entire grasp on reality. ghosts coated in shadows, confusion over lies and loss reflected as literal urban decay, the spaces representative of all the grief haunting her existence. she’s caught between the realm of the awake and the asleep, the alive and the dead. and we’re trapped for the ride through the underworld besides her until she finds the light, wherever that may be. staggering work.
Review by Eva Zee ★★★★★

Costa continues the transformation he began to effect on his own cinema in Horse Money, reshaping the slums of Lisbon from a realistically understood and concretized space into an oneiric nightmare suspended in the inhospitable threshold between the trauma of history and the myriad personal traumas of the dispossessed residents. shoddy cement structures rise like crooked tombstones and reach into what seems to be an eternal darkness, while the lines between interior and exterior disintegrate, each building seemingly bleeding into other spaces even as ghosts from without inevitably penetrate them. but Vitalina herself refuses to be cowed by spirits: her continued existence seems as much for the sake of redressing the sins of men as for her own sake. she…
Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

Vitalina Varela, titled after its leading protagonist and co-writer, discerns the Portuguese fifty-five-year-old woman portraying an interpretation of herself, and it's a mostly silent performance were recollections of an earlier time come to be central to the present as she arrives in nothing but her bare feet to the slum where her late husband made his home. It largely circumvents narrative with the fundamental objective being to exist with Vitalina, as she confronts the state of living her husband possessed while sharing heartfelt announcements of a reality they once shared.
Pedro Costa directs with a particular and purposeful pace which unfurls without any urgency with an accentuation bestowed to light and shadows as well as alleyways filled with the scattered…
Review by David Jenkins ★★★★★

Really affirms the notion that so many of Costa’s films are rooted in classical supernatural fiction, but without the recourse to trashy symbolism or extended metaphor. This one opens ominously and lethargically (pleasurably, also), but really transforms into something of an emotional rollercoaster (rollercosta?) during the final stretch. His films do not aestheticise poverty because they’re not about poverty. Coming to terms with his project is about gauging and deducing the emotions he extends towards his protagonists, but also understanding that he doesn’t see these figures as avatars for some broader drama or political intent - as speaking for the pain of others - but as unique, mysterious, unknowable souls.
Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★★ 4

Build your house well... and remember to look to the still day-lit sky when the shadows grow too deep here on the ground.
An expressionistic melancholy spell. Painstakingly composed and beautifully lit. The texture and hues of the images are remarkable.
The images do very little of the storytelling beyond place, space, and tone. The story itself is almost completely orally told. Even then, words emerge after long ambient soundscapes of unseen "slum life" always just happening beyond the image's frames or on the other side of walls.
Whether it's day or night, it's almost always pitch, with pinpoint spotlighting illuminating only parts of this desolate world and the striking faces that occupy it. Most of the image is in…

Recent reviews

Review by Nelsonator13 ★★

I like experimental music. I can go into to a contemporary art museum and 'get it'. But I couldn't stay awake during this art movie. It's visually stunning, truly, but it has the pacing of a glacier.
Review by wbeyer ★★★★

This is a film where the 2nd lead dies in the opening minutes, yet the viewer and the main protagonist have to find a way to see him present in every scene thereafter. It takes some work, accordingly, on my part, but fortunately each room and frame has the most deep dark shadows to place his ghost in.
Those darknesses are the main thing that I take away from this one. An absolute master class in lighting. We all know modern 4k sensors allow everyone to shoot in darkness - yet somehow I haven’t seen anyone evince these kinds of textures and depths yet, and with a decidedly gray, brown, black and extra-black palette alone. Tarkovskian, in aesthetic, a little? Or Velasquez-esque.
I probably won’t ever watch it again; it is slow. But just as slow as it always promised it would be anyway.
Review by Catoblepa ★★★★½

L’unico neorealismo oggi possibile, fatto di inquadrature fisse su personaggi quasi immobili, come fotografie in lento divenire, fatto di ombre che si proiettano lugubri e infernali su ogni cosa, fatto di silenzi che sfondano i timpani, fatto del sottoproletariato di oggi, i migranti che vivono in catapecchie alla periferia delle metropoli europee, che dormono in stazione, che rubano nei supermercati.
Vitalina Varela è una donna di 55 anni capoverdiana, da 25 anni separata fisicamente dal marito andatosene in Portogallo in cerca di una fortuna mai arrivata. Quando finalmente anche Vitalina arriva a Lisbona è troppo tardi, il marito è da poco morto, sepolto tre giorni prima. Non si arrende questa donna silenziosa e piena di dignità, che preferisce parlare da…
Review by Serena

U know when u are home alone and ur laying on the couch and u don’t really plan on taking a nap but suddenly ur eyelids feel super heavy and u just want to close them for a while, and before u know it u can’t tell if you’re awake and thinking or asleep and dreaming? This movie is that. And I don’t mean that as a bad or good thing, that’s just the only way I can describe it.
This movie is capital b Boring. But I couldn’t look away? The composition of every single shot is mesmerizing, and the use of light and shadows is almost intoxicating. If u have insomnia I recommend watching this bc it will…
Review by Chris Trengove ★★½

Utterly gorgeous cinematography. The use of lighting and shade was incredible. Every frame was like a painting.
Unfortunately, the pace of the film was atrocious, and the story was very uninteresting with no action and extremely slowly-spoken dialogue. It was grueling to get through.
Not for me.
Review by Jordan Muschler

I got about halfway through this, but it just wasn't doing anything for me... as much as I think the images were beautiful, immaculately lit and framed, I had a hard time empathizing with any of the characters because the blocking and performances of the actors feel so stilted and lifeless. It's definitely intentional for them to be so slow and depressed, but it ended up feeling more robotic than human to me. Apparently this is a continuation of another film, so maybe I'm lacking context, but this just didn't connect with me in any way and that's okay; I'm glad others get a lot out of it.
Review by Matthew Cormack

“If there is love, it must work out.”
Review by Jackson VanHorn ★★★★½

Now that's what I call arthouse.
Review by Brent Shenton

Visually striking, but tough for me to dig into on a narrative level
Review by Flynnick ★★★

Stunning imagery with little-to-no emotional or cognitive connection on my part
Review by BabyBuddha ★★★★½

Visually I found this film stunning. Several of the shots seemed like they could have come from Goya's black paintings with surreal fantastic hyper-realistic touches . Vitalina's story is simple and involving. Largely unremarked upon in the reviews I encountered is the story of the priest tortured by his inability to mitigate the horrendous conditions the people he ministers to.
Review by media_archivist ★★★★

His films are very unique. This is probably his most refined film to date. Each shot is so gorgeous it’s almost art film porn.