In Pedro Costa's melancholy, visually stark Casa de Lava, set amid the rocky volcanic landscape of Cape Verde, a young Portuguese nurse, Mariana (Inês de Medeiros), brings home an injured, unconscious construction worker, Leão (Isaach de Bankolé) . . . While Tourneur's noir [I Walked with a Zombie] ascribed exoticism to the locals, Costa wisely suggests that those who deny passion or the present, including the willful Mariana and Edite, are the real living dead.
Ela Bittencourt
November 3, 2017