The Wolf at the Door
“Good Manners” begins like the sort of gothic babysitting ad Mary Poppins would have refused. A woman named Clara (Isabél Zuaa), unemployed, alone, and desperate, takes a job for Ana (Marjorie Estiano), a wealthy, lonely pregnant woman with an appetite for wine, steak, and emotionally unavailable men. What starts as a simple upstairs-downstairs drama quickly turns into a lunatic fairy tale. You could say this movie has “bite,” but that’d be underselling it—it gnaws on genre conventions until they bleed.
Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s 2017 dark fantasy horror film walks a dangerous tonal tightrope. It begins as a social realist drama about class and race in Brazil, slides into a queer love story, and ends up as a werewolf parenting allegory that will have you checking your silverware for silver. And somehow, against all odds, it works. It’s a fairy tale for the age of political unrest and food allergies—a story where love is real, meat is murder, and maternity means mopping up after monsters.
The Howl of Humanity
At its heart (and entrails), “Good Manners” is a story about motherhood—the messy, exhausting, unconditional kind. When Ana’s forbidden pregnancy takes a lunar turn, Clara is forced into the world’s strangest adoption. Imagine “The Omen,” if Damien were also kind of adorable and allergic to beef jerky.
Clara’s bond with the half-human, half-wolf child Joel (Miguel Lobo) becomes the movie’s tragic heartbeat. Rojas and Dutra film their relationship with tenderness and dread, often in the same shot. One moment Clara is singing lullabies; the next, she’s strapping her beloved son into chains like a bedtime Hannibal Lecter. Parenting, the film suggests, is about loving something that might destroy you—and still tucking it in at night.
Beauty and the Beast, Brazilian Style
Stylistically, the film is gorgeous in that uncanny, slightly decaying fairytale way. São Paulo’s sterile skyline looms over pastel apartments and moonlit fields. The city feels both modern and ancient, like a haunted IKEA catalog. Cinematographer Rui Poças turns every scene into a painting—the kind where you expect something terrible to happen just outside the frame.
The directors play with contrast like mad scientists: tenderness and terror, beauty and grotesque, moonlight and madness. It’s as if Guillermo del Toro wandered into a telenovela, fell in love with the maid, and decided to shoot a musical about lycanthropy and class anxiety. Even when the film risks absurdity, it does so with confidence. “Good Manners” never apologizes for being strange—it luxuriates in it.
Love Bites (Literally)
The film’s queer romance between Clara and Ana is one of the most unexpectedly sincere love stories in modern horror. Their attraction begins with sympathy, grows through isolation, and ends with scratches, blood, and animal hunger—so basically, a pretty standard relationship arc. But beneath the supernatural weirdness is a real emotional connection.
Rojas and Dutra treat their intimacy with respect and curiosity. There’s sensuality, yes, but also vulnerability and confusion. It’s not just lust—it’s two women finding companionship in a world that treats both as disposable. That their union births a monster feels fitting; every act of love, the movie reminds us, carries the potential for destruction.
The Wolf Pup and the Working Class
Seven years later, Clara’s quiet domestic horror continues. Joel, now an awkward child with claws and questions, is kept vegetarian and confined during full moons. Clara, ever the saintly matriarch, juggles her son’s homicidal tendencies with her day job as a nurse. It’s the kind of work-life balance you don’t find in parenting books.
The film shifts from horror to melancholy fantasy, showing how monsters are not born evil—they’re raised scared. Joel’s yearning to understand his origins mirrors Brazil’s fractured social identity: the tension between privilege and poverty, instinct and civility, hunger and restraint. The title, Good Manners, becomes a bitter joke. What good are manners when the world treats you like a beast?
When Fairy Tales Get Hairy
The second half risks losing viewers who came for the horror and stayed for the hair. But that’s where “Good Manners” reveals its genius. Instead of a simple creature feature, we get a poetic exploration of love and control. Clara’s protection of Joel isn’t heroic—it’s heartbreaking. When he eventually learns the truth about his mother and his monstrous nature, his rebellion feels inevitable. Teen angst hits harder when you have fangs.
The final sequence, with Clara and Joel cornered by an angry mob, plays like the grim bedtime story Grimm himself was too squeamish to tell. There’s no happy ending, just a lullaby, a howl, and the unspoken truth that maybe the monsters were never the ones behind the door.
Moonlight Sonata of Despair
Musically, the film is eerie perfection. The lullabies recur like ghostly refrains, blurring the line between comfort and curse. The sound design makes every moonrise feel like a countdown—low hums, trembling strings, the soft click of a lock that probably won’t hold. Even silence becomes ominous, as if the air itself is waiting to scream.
And yet, there’s a warmth underneath the terror. This isn’t horror meant to shock or disgust—it’s meant to empathize. Every transformation, every howl, every drop of blood feels like a metaphor for emotional pain too big to name. You don’t just watch “Good Manners”; you absorb it like moonlight—slowly, dangerously, beautifully.
Motherhood, Monstrosity, and the Moon
Rojas and Dutra take a story that could have been schlock and turn it into tragedy. They understand that the best horror films aren’t about monsters but about what makes us human. Clara’s sacrifice—her endless care, her loneliness, her refusal to abandon what others would kill—is more chilling than any jump scare.
Isabél Zuaa’s performance anchors the madness. Her Clara is stoic, kind, and quietly feral in her own way. Marjorie Estiano’s Ana is all contradiction: wealthy yet trapped, maternal yet monstrous. Together, they create a love story written in blood and baby formula.
Final Thoughts: Eat Your Heart Out
“Good Manners” is a film that sneaks up on you. It lulls you with its lullabies, seduces you with its moonlight, and then, when your guard is down, it tears a chunk out of your soul. It’s part horror, part melodrama, part myth—all heart.
It’s about love without boundaries, motherhood without guarantees, and monsters without apologies. It’s what happens when compassion meets carnage and decides to stay for breakfast.
If you like your fairy tales grim, your horror humane, and your metaphors covered in fur, Good Manners will make you howl with delight—and maybe a little heartbreak.
After all, good manners may keep the neighbors comfortable, but sometimes you’ve just got to let the wolf out.
