The Blue Trail: Age Is Way More Than Just a Number

By Chris Knight

Rating: B-

If Logan’s Run and The African Queen had a baby, it might look something like Brazilian dystopian sci-fi drama The Blue Trail. If that’s too much of a narrative stretch, then imagine a close cousin to 2024’s Can I Get a Witness? Except, sadly, not nearly as good.

Can I Get a Witness? by Canada’s Ann Marie Fleming posits a world where human lives are suicidally capped at 50 years, for the benefit of the planet. In The Blue Trail by co-writer and director Gabriel Mascaro, the cutoff is 77 and the policy is less dire.

Or it is? When Tereza (Denise Weinberg) reaches the milestone, a government worker gives her a cheesy medallion. To which no-nonsense Tereza quips: “Since when was getting old an honour?”

But then she’s told she’s going to be sent to an old person’s colony. In the meantime, her daughter is given custody of her.

This might be the film’s first stumble. For a government policy that’s been in place for at least a few years, there’s remarkably little information on what it involves, and Tereza seems taken aback by the news. The script imagines that the age used to be 80, but that didn’t quite still my “but what about…?” questions.

In any case, she gets it in her head that she’d like to take a plane ride before she is sent away, but her daughter won’t allow it. So, she hires a shady boat captain to transport her upriver to a small airport where she might be able to hitch a ride on an ultralight.

The voyage turns into more than just a quest. Captain Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro) introduces Tereza to the “blue drool snail,” a gastropod whose azure effluent when squirted in your eyes can take you on a trip and reveal your future. She also runs into Roberta (Miriam Socarras), who plies the river hawking electronic Bibles, and seems to have aged well past the cut-off without attracting the government’s notice.

It’s an interesting, sometimes humorous meditation on elderly independence, with some lovely visuals, but I did yearn for a little more background detail about the world it conjures. One senses the budget was stretched as far as it could go, and any depiction of the colony of elders wasn’t in the cards.

And I’ve seen reviews referring to Weinberg’s performance as “nuanced” and “winning,” but I found it a little flat at times. Maybe a casting mistake, or a directing choice, but there could have been more done to connect viewers to the protagonist’s plight. The trail runs a little cold.

The Blue Trail. Directed by Gabriel Mascaro. Starring Denise Weinberg, Rodrigo Santoro, and Miriam Socarras. In theatres April 3.