Motel Destino, a secluded hotel by the hour on the northern Brazilian coast, shines in bright neon colors under the boundless expanse of the bright blue sky. This is where young Heraldo ends up after a robbery gone wrong, on the run from the police and his own accomplices. The opaque owner Elias and his wife Dayana don't ask many questions: for Elias, Heraldo comes in handy as cheap labor tied to the motel, and Dayana, increasingly frustrated by the narrowness of her life, is fascinated by the strangely naive young man. A dangerous game begins, a dance of power, desire, loyalties, love, a trial of strength in which the desire for freedom becomes ever more urgent.

Motel Destino is a tropical noir full of light, colors and bodies, longing, violence, desire and tenderness, with the great Igor Xavier, Nataly Rocha and Fabio Assunção in the leading roles, wonderfully filmed by cinematographer Hélène Louvart and edited by Nelly Quettier. Everything that happens here is expressed in and through the bodies, the violence in a society shattered after years of Bolsonaro's government, the longing for a life of their own, the desire and rebellion of a youth desperately trying to take fate into their own hands.

One of the most sweat-drenched neo-noirs to hit the screen since Kathleen Turner and William Hurt soaked through their shirts in “Body Heat”... Once you submit to the film’s fevered sensual energy, it becomes its own kind of blast, throbbing with sound and color and movement, and genuinely hilarious in its unabashed lubriciousness. - Variety

'Motel Destino' is defiantly shameless: a sexually-liberated slow-burner fueled by its characters’ libidos set in what feels like a haunted nightclub, where the dancers are all too eager to make love and murder. - Viennale