Streaming: From out of darkness comes ˋVitalina Varela’

“Vitalina Varela,” the latest release from director Pedro Costa, presents people in aching isolation—almost every shot in the film resembles a dramatic tableau, with dimly lit subjects on dark stages. This depiction of black Portuguese working people (most hailing from the former colony Cape Verde) is all about seeing and feeling the weight of hard work on human lives—the first spoken dialogue occurs six minutes into the film, and the first instance of natural light comes from a crack in the doorway almost a half hour into the picture.

We’re presented with a nighttime recessional from a graveyard, with mourners shuffling home to their improvised dwellings in a shantytown far removed from Lisbon’s city center. From his “Fontainhas” film cycle onward, director Pedro Costa has proven himself the master of immaculately-composed images of hard-bitten people leading quietly heroic lives.

Here, Costa works with only non-professional actors, including a woman named Vitalina Varela, who lends her name and real-life story to the film. She’s first seen descending the airplane steps on an abandoned runway and the first thing she hears is, “His house is not yours.” This is a reference to her husband, a bricklayer who died under unclear circumstances before Vitalina’s arrival from Cape Verde. Settling into his rough-hewn rooms, she speaks with him directly about the house they constructed in Cape Verde decades earlier: “I’ve been waiting for my plane ticket to Portugal for 40 years.”

Her surrounds are grim—unfinished floors and walls, crumbling plaster in the shower, and only the bare necessities to eat. And, yet, when Vitalina ties a white kerchief around her head and looks out an open window, she suddenly resembles the subject of a Vermeer painting.

The rest of the ensemble cast have the sort of lived-in faces that approach the diametric opposite to the actors in say, “Sex in the City 2.” The most recognizable face belongs to a longtime Costa collaborator who goes by the mononym Ventura. He plays a neighborhood vagabond who we eventually learn is a priest who presides over a tiny, empty chapel. Shaky, malnourished, and on the verge of collapse, he still explains to Vitalina that her husband, “Left with a clean soul.”

At every turn, Costa holds, and holds—and holds—our attention with his painterly patience. Helped by his formidable cinematographer Leonardo Simões, Costa creates many stunning shots, as when Vitalina clambers onto her tin roof, trying to shore up the weak spots as a storm blows in off the coast. In a brilliant bit of editing, that fierce wind blows her mind back again to Cape Verde in her youth.

Black clothes hanging on a line shiver like wraiths as Vitalina walks through them and the strangled voice of a ghost whispers, “We were born from these shadows.” In a literal sense, this is darkest film you’re likely to see all year. Throughout “Vitalina Varela” there is no apparent source of light and yet, in spite of it all, there is light.