A sharp, self-abnegating performance from Anabela Moreira elevates this passionate – largely in the religious sense – Portuguese debut, which is only now arriving in the UK after festival screenings dating back to 2020. As senior nun Josefina, she wears a permanent cowl of careworn melancholy, suggesting a woman for whom, even after she is summoned to look after her bereaved 15-year-old nephew Alexandre (Martim Canavarro), holding the world at arm’s length is standard practice. Watching him slam into girl drivers on the fairground dodgems, it seems clear that desire is for other people.
Or maybe not. Josefina is called back to her childhood village after the death of her father, who – in her wantaway sister’s absence – was Alexandre’s guardian. Traumatised by finding the body and spoiled because he was the first birth in the locality for years, the teenager requires mollycoddling. So Josefina finds herself in uncomfortable proximity to this coltish overgrown boy, who looks like a male model in waiting; bathing him, letting him sleep in her bed after he has wet his, inspecting his penis infection. She suffers it, presumably for love and our Lord. But when it becomes clear that he may be shipped off to a foster home if she doesn’t stick around, her inner motivations come into sharper focus.
From the opening, symbolically charged image of Alexandre running haplessly around a maze of terraced vineyards, director David Bonneville has a keen sense of the higher implications of his story. He’s clearly interested in the boundaries and pathways behind spiritual, familial and physical love; finding a used condom in a bed at her convent, employing a self-mortifying garter, Josefina obviously regards the last of these as off-limits. But caring so intimately for Alexandre reawakens powerful feelings. The daily baths perhaps aren’t purely a devotional act; the photographs she takes of him sleeping testify to an adoration tipping into something transgressive.
This growing possessiveness comes to a head with the return of Alexandre’s mother Angela (Margarida Moreira), a caricatured irresponsible glamourpuss who turns his head. The Last Bath’s resolution feels forced, which is a shame given the amount of faith Bonneville hitherto places in his audience in not giving them easy answers and letting this domestic mystery play breathe – a sign of the film’s spiritual strength.
• The Last Bath is on digital platforms from 14 September
