by Hudson Moura
Daniel Nolasco’s Only Good Things (Apenas Coisas Boas, Brazil, 2025) opens like a half-remembered myth: a lone biker in 1970s leathers, a deserted road, a sudden accident. A nearby farmer, counting his cattle, notices one missing and rides out; instead of the cow, he finds the injured stranger, hauls him onto his horse, and brings him home. From there, the film settles into the languid tempo of the farm—long takes, muted dialogue, spaces half-swallowed by vegetation and fog—as if time itself were decaying along with the house.
As in Dry Wind, Nolasco is drawn to queer desire in Brazilian rural, working-class landscapes: dust, sweat, leather, the friction between repression and fantasy. Once the biker enters the farmhouse, the film leans into that erotic charge: glances, proximities, gestures that oscillate between care and projection. The countryside is not pastoral refuge but a haunted zone where bodies, memories, and abandoned spaces blur. A voiceover letter—addressed to Antônio (the farmer), sliding between complaint, confession, and elegy—deepens the sense that we are inside someone’s psychic residue rather than a conventional narrative: “the house is condemned,” “the forest is taking over,” “it feels like everything else is gone.” It plays less as exposition than as a drifting interior monologue over an already spectral world.
The problem is that this time Nolasco’s aesthetic outpaces his dramaturgy. Only Good Things reprises the sensual, humid formal vocabulary of Dry Wind—slow, attentive camera; tactile sound; an interest in male bodies as both laboring and desiring—but without the same anchoring in character or situation. Desire is present, but its stakes remain under-articulated—especially once the film’s second half shifts to the present-day city—so the bond between biker and farmer feels more emblematic than fully lived-in. The repetition of poses, tensions, and atmospheres risks sliding from hypnotic to indistinct. The film invites us to inhabit affect (alienation, longing, abandonment), yet offers few points of orientation beyond mood and symbol.
To its credit, the work remains visually compelling. The encroaching nature, the collapsing house, the rural emptiness: all register as a quiet allegory of erasure—of relationships, of queer histories, of lifeworlds left to rot. There is an intriguing suggestion that the biker might be less a concrete character than a catalyst or projection: something the farmer finds instead of his missing cow, an object of care and desire standing in for everything already lost. But this suggestion is never fully developed. Where Dry Wind triangulated labor, fantasy, and power with a bracing clarity, Only Good Things diffuses into abstraction.
Nolasco remains a distinctive voice, and there are sequences here—especially those where the house, forest, and bodies fuse—that feel like fragments of a stronger film. But as it stands, Only Good Things is a minor, elusive entry: an evocative queer rural trance-piece whose textures linger, while its characters and narrative largely slip through the fingers. 
Rating: 2.8/5