Summary
Despite a short runtime, Rivers of Fate is draining in its sustained, unflinching portrayal of humanity’s worst impulses.
Rivers of Fate seems sprung to life as a dare, almost as if directors Fernando and Quico Meirelles were trying to win a bet about how much truly heinous stuff they could cram into just four episodes. The fact that those four episodes feel like forever, thanks to the procession of awful developments crammed into them, should tell you how they did. Shock factor alone, though, does not a good show make, and it’s difficult to know where to stand on this brutal Brazilian crime drama as a result.
The title makes sense, at least. Rivers of Fate refers not just to the Amazon but to the interconnected lives in the vicinity of it, which intersect tributary-like against the backdrop of a violent human trafficking operation. It’s based on a novel of the same name, but doesn’t feel especially literary in its adaptation, perhaps because it has been collapsed into a too-tight run of episodes. But no matter, since I haven’t read the novel and thus won’t refer to it again; for fans of the source material, mileage may vary.
You know you’re off to a worrying start when the show introduces one of its three point-of-view characters, Janalice (Domithila Cattete), as the victim of revenge porn that travels around the local community so quickly that her own father ends up gathering around with his colleagues to watch it at work, not realising initially that the young woman looking up at the camera is his daughter. When that’s your opening, you’re in pretty serious territory, and Janalice, having been sent to live with her aunt, is promptly kidnapped by river pirates for predictably unsavoury purposes.
Preá (Lucas Galvino) is one of these pirates, but curiously takes such a shine to Janalice that it shakes his worldview pretty much immediately. He’s also the connective tissue between Janalice and Mariangel (Marleyda Soto), who is out for revenge on Preá and co. for the murder of her family. These three characters and the clutch of supporting players in each of their ambits form a nest of narrative strands that wriggles viper-like at the centre of an otherwise fairly bog-standard thriller.
The sex trafficking subplot provides important thematic meat, but also gets wearing after a while. River of Fate’s eagerness to leverage sexual violence is off-putting, a shortcut to raise the stakes where the writing doesn’t quite cut it. There’s nothing wrong with telling stories about these subjects, of course, but this show’s relentless approach to doing so has a tedious try-hard quality, especially in the first couple of episodes (which, in a show so short, constitutes half the runtime.)
The back half is more action-oriented and arguably provides the catharsis you’ll need after sitting through so much suffering. “Happy ending” is a relative term, but it’s clear that the intention was a satisfying – albeit violent – payoff. Whether that justifies the approach of the rest of the season is up for some debate, but there’s a baseline level of quality to Rivers of Fate that is difficult to argue with. Fernando Meirelles is best known for The Two Popes and City of God, but also recently worked on Apple TV+’s Sugar and HBO’s The Sympathizer, so he has a precedent for capable cinematic storytelling.
Rivers of Fate is not necessarily possessed of this same sophistication in all areas of its production, especially on the script level and in its commitment to shock tactics, but it’s a well-made series in many respects that breezes by thanks to its welcome brevity (why don’t more shows run for just four episodes?). Some viewers will find all this extremely off-putting, so keep that in mind, but otherwise it’s worth a look if you’re into such things.
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