“Who the hell are you?” Gabriel screams, desperate, furious, almost pleading. “Where is the guy who made those beautiful videos? Where is he?” The question goes unanswered. Because what we, the audience, are shown is not a fascinating mystery, not a magnetic lover, but the one-dimensional portrait of an aggressive, invasive, dominant escort. A figure you can’t trust from the start. Gabriel falls in love, gets hurt, is left in the lurch, yet clings to this phantom shimmer of a projection — and we spectators are left puzzling over it.
Felipe Sholl directs with Everything That Burns an erotic thriller that promises a lot but dares little new. We recognize this story: Gabriel moves to Rio de Janeiro, falls for a sex worker he can never truly possess, and descends into the spiral of obsession. Adriano — unreliable, elusive, emotionally out of reach — pulls him toward the abyss. The narrative unfolds exactly as one might expect from the first minutes: a self-destructive melodrama that pretends to be unfathomable, but in truth has long since been told.
Many sex scenes, little emotion
Gabriel’s behavior remains perversely hard to understand. He follows Adriano, spies on him, staggers into jealousy fantasies, and even moves into his house while Adriano is away. But why? What emptiness does this manic fixation fill? What is his background, his desire, his pain? The film stays silent. Physically the two seem close, but emotionally there is a yawning emptiness.
That’s the problem: the numerous sex scenes — undeniably aesthetically and grippingly shot — lose their narrative force. Passion, fascination, longing: none of it feels tangible. Instead, there is roughness, distance, yes, an almost repulsive lovelessness. Not a single real conversation occurs between Gabriel and Adriano. And Gabriel’s biographical anchors — moving after his grandmother’s death, the nebulous family dynamic, his job as a literature teacher — read like loose narrative fragments that never cohere into a solid whole.
Even the economic dimension remains strangely underdeveloped: Gabriel inherits money, rejects his father’s money, but otherwise acts naïve to the point of recklessness. The fact that his chosen family points out this contradiction to him is ignored with stoic stubbornness. Even Mônica, the trans woman and proprietor of the titular bar Glória (Ruas da Glória in the original), remains an unclear figure. Her potentially self-serving motives are never explored, her relationship to Gabriel remains as enigmatic as to the other members of the chosen family, with whom he occasionally also engages sexually.
One theme after another
Visually, Sholl leans on repetition, to the point of exhaustion: the sea of Rio, the bar Glória, Cinelândia as a red-light district, Adriano’s apartment. Add to that the repeatedly interspersed video footage on the beach — those “beautiful videos” Gabriel utters at the start. Sometimes they’re addressed to the late grandmother, sometimes to a lover, sometimes Adriano speaks himself. But what initially feels like intimate fragments quickly loses its poetic power. The language switch to Spanish, since Adriano hails from Uruguay, is a delicate moment — one of the few that actually hints at deeper depth.
Direct link | Official German trailer for the film
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Yet overall, a sketched, never truly developed set of themes lines up one after another: exclusion from the origin family, the search for chosen kin, toxic relationships, the pull of drugs and sex (chemsex), the pose of hyper-masculine gays, internalized homophobia, the projections onto sex workers. None of these is developed consistently; everything remains superficial. Everything That Burns thus reads less like a gripping psychogram or a multi-layered thriller and more like an escalating Grindr hookup: intense, rough, but ultimately without emotional aftertaste.
Info about the film
Everything That Burns. Drama. Brazil 2024. Director: Felipe Sholl. Cast: Caio Macedo, Alejandro Claveaux, Diva Menner, Alan Ribeiro, Jade Sassará, Sandro Aliprandini. Running time: 103 minutes. Language: Portuguese-Spanish original with German subtitles. Rating: 18+. Exclusive at Salzgeber Club
Gallery: Everything That Burns
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