The Portuguese House

Avelina Prat spent twenty years as a production designer before directing Vasil in 2022; her second feature is a Spanish-Portuguese production shot largely in the Minho, and it screened at San Sebastián in the Made in Spain strand.

Manolo Solo plays Fernando, a teacher whose wife disappears without a note and who responds by disappearing himself — assuming the identity of a man who has died and taking work as a gardener at a quinta belonging to Amalia, played by Maria de Medeiros. The house has a library, a cook, an absent family and a routine that absorbs him. Prat films the estate the way a designer would, in long patient takes of rooms and grounds, and lets the deception sit unexamined for most of the running time.

It is a quiet film about grief and self-erasure that mostly declines to explain itself, and the pleasure is in the company: Solo and de Medeiros, two very fine actors, circling each other politely across a garden. Slighter than most things in the catalogue, and unusually restful.