Horse Money, film review

To those without a knowledge of recent Portuguese politics and history, or the earlier films of Pedro Costa, Horse Money may seem daunting – but it is rewarding. This is an eerie, unsettling film in which the main character, Ventura (a regular collaborator with Costa), is confronted with ghosts from his and his country's past. He is like someone out of a Portuguese version of a Beckett play – an old, black man with a white beard, incarcerated in a decaying asylum. Horse Money is hermetic to the point of being baffling, but in its dream-like way it is atmospheric and intriguing. Darkly but artfully lit, with mesmeric music and a beguiling rhythm, it has the feel of an elegy for a lost world – the Lisbon of its hero's youth. µ