Otavio (Tavinho Teixeira) is rich, bitch! My dude lives in a swank crib on a private beach, is the CEO of a private security company…and is a member in good standing in one hell of an elite club…a secret society of hoity-toity types heavily invested in making Brazil (where the film is set) a place devoid of anything other than their ilk. Oh and they eat people.
Otavio takes his culinary tastes home with him as well, as he and his wife routinely murder the help…well, not until Gilda (Ana Luiza Rios) fucks them and O-dawg gets his fap on before burying an ax in anyone unfortunate enough to answer their Help Wanted ads…before cooking and eating them.
Things go swimmingly until Gilda happens to peep a secret involving the club’s main man, the congressman Borges (Pedro Domingues)…a secret that if told would ruin his plans for re-election, and put the entire club in jeopardy. As you can imagine this puts our hungry, hungry heroes in a bit of hot water as the club has killed to keep their secrets before!
While definitely a film preoccupied with cannibalism and fucking; The Cannibal Club is, at it’s core, a very simple parable demonstrating how those with the money and the power keep themselves in riches by consuming the resource that is the lower class…in real life by using them as an underpaid workforce, or a means of acquiring taxes…or in this satire as actual food and fuck toys! Though Writer/Director Guto Parente set his tale in Brazil, a country that has a large difference in wealth distribution among it’s citizenry, the moral can easily be applicable anywhere as the rich will always devour the poor.
While the lesson laid out by The Cannibal Club is strong, the film does have a major stumbling block, and that is the fact that it’s de facto protagonists are really shitty people. It’s hard to root for spoiled, greedy, bigoted folks that make a habit of using people for sex and then eating the hell out of them…so for most of the film we are left with no one to root for and the vibe of the picture can definitely leave you feeling cold…though the rich cinematography of Lucas Barbi and deft editing by Luiz and Ricardo Pretti definitely helps anchor audience interest and engagement.
At the end of the day, The Cannibal Club is a flick about beautiful people doing ugly things with a dash of those fan favs; sex and violence…and the message is strong too…just don’t expect to relate to any of the characters…and Satan help us all if you do!
