Vitalina Varela

2019 Directed by Pedro Costa

Suddenly, in the sumptuous darkness of a neighborhood haunted by solemn shadows, the deep red of bloody sheets. Vitalina Varela is too late; all she can do now is settle her husband’s affairs. She will mourn no unfortunates: facing bitter and fallen men, she resolves to rebuild the memory of a solid shared house in Cape Verde, blueprint by blueprint and wall by wall, fighting the sad reality of a life that could not be built under a decent roof in Portugal.

Vitalina Varela Ventura Lina Varela Manuel Tavares Almeida Francisco dos Santos Brito Imídio Monteiro Marina Alves Domingues

124 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Jon M. ★★★★★ 26

Let me see what I can say of Vitalina. I have seen it twice, and continue to struggle with it in the days since; I wrote some 4000 words on it after my first viewing, only to toss out a good portion after sitting with it longer, fearing that against my better intentions the writing still remained vague and imprecise. It is only fair to Costa to wait until whatever I have to say – as if my writing was so important, which it isn’t – can be said with a certain precision, a precision that matches that of his own cinema. In an interview with Giovanni Marchini Camia, Costa opposed himself to the merely symbolic, decadent form of art…
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 15

"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

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 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 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 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 Ayeen Forootan ★★★★½

I am totally amazed how Costa radicalizes his previous works and strip them down even more than before to their very essential core through Vitalina Varela. As if, each new film for Costa is an absolute act of purification and refinement.
Costa looks into the darkest depths of an abyss, a phantom-space and a realm of the living dead to observe wandering human-ghosts and lost shadow-borns. And yes, here, the black color plays a definitive role - both materially and spiritually - as much as the white color was to Dreyer or Bresson.
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.

Recent reviews

Review by Alfred Haddon ★★★★½

Touches the sublime. An ultimately hopeful portrait of an individual, and a forceful address to the complacent viewer on the beauty and pain in realities that we might hide away from. Excited to learn more about Costa and his work process.
Review by Patrick ★★★★★

This is one of the best looking films I’ve ever seen. Each shot could be printed and framed in an art gallery. That’s no exaggeration - this is truly a film where every image bares the careful craft and vivid detail of powerfully expressive still-photography. These images tell a haunting story of a character coping with loss. The loss of her estranged husband’s life and the loss of their life together, which he stole when he fled to Portugal. It’s a somber, heartbreaking story that’s rendered remarkably powerful by some genuinely astonishing visual filmmaking by Pedro Costa. I hope I one day get the chance to watch this film on the big cinema screen that it richly deserves.
Review by The12thMonkey ★★★★

Pedro Costa’s 2019 deliberate, composed Portuguese film “Vitalina Varela” follows the disheartened Vitalina, after decades of abandonment, arriving after her husband’s death, confronts and mourns her loss, within the isolated and dispossessed slums of Lisbon.
Review by hhibou ★★★★★

Kamera açıları, ışıklandırma muhteşem💕
Review by Vinicius Bastos

If I speak Portuguese will you speak to me?
Vitalina Varela is a gorgeous gem of Portuguese cinema whose hyper-slow pace can be challenging but fortunately gets more and more compelling as access is granted into the protagonist’s sorrow.
Varela (playing herself) is a Cape Verdean woman who arrives in Lisbon three days after her husband's funeral. She gets off the aeroplane the same way her compatriot Cesária Évora used to perform: barefoot. Director Pedro Costa makes use of expressionistic images to slowly let her pain and grief unfold on screen in a way that, as the film progresses, you realise you’re watching something special and unique.
Shot almost entirely at night in Fontaínhas, a recently demolished Cape Verdean neighbourhood…
Review by Robert Woods ★½

A woman arrives 3 days late to her estranged husband's funeral and slowly discovers his life from what has been left behind while he figures out her new place in what is left. I found this one rather impenetrable, the style of it and the pace was a bit of a struggle. Having said that the cinematography is amazing with the film being told entirely in static 4:3 shots, the majority of which are super high key deep focus high contrast images that look very painterly and noir-ish. So while this isn't for me, I can see its appeal for others.
Review by tempacc

Light. Shadow. Faces. Buildings. Memory. Important.
Review by Cameron Wayne Johnson ★½

Not to be confused with "Ventura", which is probably why Pedro Costa's new muse let him credit her with her full name. An auteur in meta tragedy breaks pushes Ventura to the supporting cast to give a voice to another suffering soul, which would feel more benevolent if he weren't fixated on a specific ordeal in her suffering. Take this, Jafar Panahi: Vitalina Varela's story from "Horse Money" is now its own barely qualified feature movie, as she reels from the death of her husband, who left Cape Verde to provide for the family years ago. Vitalina must now put his affairs in order in Lisbon, arriving too late for his funeral, and settling into a home as run-down as…
Review by Malala

Qué difícil calificar una película como ésta que genera tanto y tan poco. Momentos de profundo tedio, seguidos por la maravilla de imágenes increíbles, seguidas de tedio y así dos horas.
Review by Jordan Peters ★★★★

In her Costa has found a screen presence that is a worthy match for his rich visual language- she's never swallowed up by the filmmaking, emotion and stasis bleeding into each other.
Review by hthief ★★★★

grievance made form in a languid movie, where bleakness is arresting, where the life weary hardened faces of the actors tell more than the few lines said
but only through mourning can you move towards a new morning
Review by Andrew ★★★★★

When they love you and they will, tell them all they'll love in my shadow.