Last November, local audiences caught a single screening of João Pedro Rodrigues’ O ORNITÓLOGO at the AFI festival, and now it’s back for a full-week run at the Nuart.

“O ORNITÓLOGO is consistently unsettling, but it also simultaneously allows us to enter a meditative zone, savoring the stately grandeur of the images as well as the startling competency of Fernando, a fetishized stud from the Jason Statham Institute of Abs and Buttocks who weathers danger with comic unflappability.

“Rodrigues is a rapt and daring formalist, who stages suspense-film set pieces as if they’re moments from an observational documentary, grounding heightened tropes in a convincing faux-reality. He also has a perversely unruly streak that gradually comes to O ORNITÓLOGO’s fore. The first hour suggests the film that might have resulted if Tarkovsky had directed a 1970s Australian thriller, but Rodrigues is ultimately after different aesthetic game.” — Chuck Bowen

Rodrigues dubs Hamy’s voice throughout the film—a doubling that, by the end of the film, takes corporeal form.

O ORNITÓLOGO/THE ORNITHOLOGIST

Through July 6.

Nuart

11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

From top: Paul Hamy in O Ornitólogo (2016); Hamy (left) and Xelo Cagiao (2). Image credit: Strand Releasing.