Heraldo (Iago Xavier) wants out of the mob. To escape, he and his brother, Jorges (Renan Capivara) have to complete a hit job. Instead of staying in to prepare the night before the job, Heraldo—young and foolish—goes out to the local beach bar. There he meets and seduces a beautiful stranger (Isabela Catão). They kick on to a sex motel, the titular Motel Destino. But when he wakes up the next morning, he discovers that he’s overslept—the hit is happening soon, and worse: the stranger has fled in the night, leaving him to foot the bill. After a quick, violent, sexually charged negotiation with one of the motel employees, Dayana (Nataly Rocha), he scrambles to the rendezvous. But he is too late: Jorges tried to carry out the job solo, and it went horribly wrong, costing him his life.

With nowhere else to go, Heraldo returns to the Motel Destino and begs Dayana for a job. The chemistry between them wins out over common sense—she takes him in, and the two begin sleeping together. But matters are complicated by Elias (Fábio Assunção), the motel’s owner and Dayana’s partner, who is voraciously horny and sexually fluid. Instantly, he falls in lust with Heraldo. It’s a double bind, like something from an old noir film. Heraldo can’t leave, because to do so would put him in the mob’s firing line. But the longer he stays, the closer he and Dayana grow, thus burning Elias, whose desires tend to turn violent when left unsated.

It’s hard to watch Motel Destino without thinking of the ongoing discourse surrounding (the lack of) sex scenes in contemporary cinema. The film itself could not be less interested in that conversation; it is a wilfully self-enclosed erotic thriller, albeit one that doesn’t have much to say about the blurry line between eroticism and violence (besides the fact that it can get pretty blurry). Nor is there much to offer in the way of thrills. But when considered in relation to this larger debate, and how it sits across certain cultural fault lines, Motel Destino becomes more interesting—if still not a total success.

Sex is everywhere in the film. Moans of pleasure echo up and down Destino’s hallways at all hours of the day. The screenplay, penned by director Karim Aïnouz along with co-writers Wislan Esmeraldo and Mauricio Zacharias, is composed largely of double entendre. The first thing Elias says to Heraldo upon meeting is, “Without air-conditioning, this suite is a sauna.” It’s one of the film’s subtler lines. And speaking of saunas, the whole film is lit like one: full of gauzy, lurid neon, the kind that makes muscles pop and catches every drop of sweat. Even the day scenes look this way, as cinematographer Hélène Louvart ratchets up the exposure so high that sunlight comes out canary yellow and the sky looks like printer ink.

This totalising sense of lustiness is the biggest thing the film has going for it. It would have been possible to make a less explicit version of this film—one where the love triangle exists solely in gesture and suggestion, where much of the ‘action’ is implied by cutaways, and the little that we do see is shot tastefully, with everything below the hip kept out of frame. But that film would have been decidedly worse. Aïnouz is an accomplished stylist, and by holding back nothing, he allows his actors to really go for it too. It’s fun watching Heraldo and Dayana fuck nasty because Xavier and Rocha have plenty of chemistry, and they’re clearly enjoying flexing actorly muscles that they mightn’t get to use that often. Assunção is having a field day as Elias; he finds a couple dozen different ways to play horny menace—the only character beat he seems to have—and they’re all as maniacal as they are delightful.

Detractors of the sex scene tend to hinge their argument on the idea of ‘narrative utility’; they accuse sex scenes of rarely moving a plot forward. But, in the case of Motel Destino, I don’t know how much water that line of reasoning could hold, because most scenes—even the chaste ones—contribute little to the plot, which itself is in shambles.

Motel Destino starts out with a vague premise and runs out of steam completely by the half-hour mark. Interpersonal relationships are one of the only things maintaining momentum on a moment-to-moment basis; the sex is actually essential because it renders these dynamics hyper-legible. The mob plot line may get completely lost, but at least there’s always the tension of whether Elias will find out what’s been going on behind his back, and what will happen when he comes onto the resolutely heterosexual Heraldo a little too directly. These threads are never as developed as you’d hope they’d be, but their resolutions are still somehow lacking.

You never want to come away from a film saying “Damn, what a pity,” especially one that wants so badly to titillate. But damn, what a pity all that mood, all that style, and all those performances are wasted on a script this wayward. What a pity a film so dedicated to movie sex isn’t a more airtight argument in its favour. And what a pity that the foreplay doesn’t deliver a climax, or even a worthwhile ride.

Motel Destino screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival on the 16th and 25th of August. 

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Joshua Sorensen is a writer, bookseller, and committee member for #LoveOzYA based in Naarm. Movies starring Holly Hunter are to him what lamps are to David Byrne.