Mysteries of Lisbon – review

It may be more than four hours long, but Raúl Ruiz's final film is an entrancingly strange, beautifully eccentric fable set in 19th-century Portugal

This is the last completed work from the remarkable and prolific Chilean film-maker Raúl Ruiz, who died in August this year at the age of 70. Originally intended as a TV mini-series, it has now been boldly put together as a dream-epic feature in two parts, lasting four-and-a-half hours. Mysteries of Lisbon is intensely and captivatingly strange, a sinuous melodrama about secrecy, destiny and memory in which everyone involved appears to be in a state of hypnosis and on the edge of departing for some Magrittean alternative universe. "Mysteries" is exactly right.
Ruiz's screenwriter Carlos Saboga has adapted an 1854 novel, Mistérios de Lisboa, by the Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco, set around the turn of the 19th century. Branco's story is an involved tale of coincidences, hidden aristocratic parentage, extraordinary legacies, passion, honour, sexual obsession and the fighting of duels.

The Guardian.