by Hudson Moura
The arrival of Habeas Corpus on Netflix, directed by Luiz Villaça, marks an ambitious step for Brazilian screen drama by exploring the legal genre, historically far less developed in Brazilian mainstream television than in American film and television. Built around the timely and deeply relevant issue of wrongful convictions and procedural injustice, and inspired by the real work of the Innocence Project Brasil, the series exposes bureaucratic negligence and the mechanisms of institutional corruption. Across its eight episodes, the writing remains relatively lean and sustains an effective level of suspense. Yet the final result constantly oscillates between the technical discipline of the courtroom drama and the emotional excesses associated with Brazilian melodramatic traditions.
The strongest element of the series is Marjorie Estiano as the law professor Inez. Her performance is precise, restrained, and remarkably controlled. She communicates her character’s trauma largely through silences, expressions, and small gestures, avoiding obvious emotional clichés.
By contrast, the storyline centred on law student Marina, played by Any Gabrielly, leans much more heavily into melodrama. The constant tears, trembling emotion, and visibly heightened suffering sometimes overwhelm the scenes. This emotional insistence creates an uncomfortable tension within the series, as personal melodrama begins to compete with the procedural rigor expected from a criminal investigation and a more serious professional conduct.
Sometimes the series’ uses “artificiality” of some of its courtroom dialogue. A courtroom is fundamentally a space of performance, hierarchy, and ritual, where formal language itself becomes part of the drama. Expressions such as “Your Honour,” “Counsel,” “Sir,” or their Brazilian legal equivalents function almost like institutional armour. The real theatrical pleasure of legal drama often comes from watching opposing sides attack, provoke, or destabilize one another while remaining within strict codes of decorum.
By allowing lawyers to address witnesses, police officers, and opponents with the informal “você”, the series weakens that sense of institutional ritual, increasing the witnesses harrassement. The simplification also reduces the linguistic subtext and at times turns what should feel like legal chess into a more ordinary verbal confrontation. In making legal language more accessible to a general audience, Habeas Corpus sacrifices some of the precision and verbal sophistication that define the best courtroom dramas.
Where the dialogue sometimes abandons formal complexity, the sound design introduces a far more sophisticated dramatic language. Unlike the more traditional use of music in Brazilian telenovelas—where sound often arrives after an event to underline a reaction—Habeas Corpus frequently uses a continuous layer of suspense.
Low-frequency textures, pulses, and sustained sonic elements move beneath the dialogue, linking one exchange to another and minimizing dead space. The effect is almost a form of sonic chaining: sound becomes an invisible connective tissue that maintains tension between scenes and produces a continuous sense of forward movement. It is one of the series’ most effective formal strategies, creating a more internationally recognizable streaming-thriller rhythm.
Habeas Corpus is an intense, technically efficient series with strong cultural relevance. Its greatest achievement is bringing the courtroom drama into a distinctly Brazilian context through a social issue of real urgency: wrongful convictions, procedural failures, and the fragility of trust in the justice system. That subject feels particularly timely in Brazil today, at a moment when the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) itself is under intense public scrutiny amid allegations, internal disputes, questions surrounding judicial conduct, and highly contentious proceedings broadcast live on television. In this context, a series about failures within the judiciary acquires a resonance that goes well beyond its individual cases: it inevitably speaks to a society increasingly questioning how justice is exercised, represented, and trusted.
Its limitations come from the balance it tries to strike between two traditions. On one side is the Brazilian and Latin American melodramatic heritage, built around heightened emotion and personal suffering; on the other is the faster, cleaner, more procedural language associated with contemporary streaming drama.
At its best, Habeas Corpus finds an effective middle ground between these forms. But when emotional excess and simplified courtroom language take over, the series loses some of the realism, verbal tension, and institutional complexity that could have made it a truly sophisticated legal drama.
Rating: 3.7/5