What kid doesn’t like playing in their parents’ car? Pretending to drive, imagining the grand adventures waiting on the open road? Yes, a car can be a magical place for a young person. But most of us don’t have psychic connections with those cars.

The son of a family with a taxi service, young Uno was born in the backseat of one of the taxis during a traffic jam. As he grew, Uno developed a special bond with the taxi, able to literally hear it speak to him. The two became best friends, as close as any two humans. Until the day Uno’s mother (Ane Oliva) is killed while driving the vehicle. The crumpled car is decommissioned and sent to slowly rot in the family junkyard.

Now grown, Uno (Luciano Pedro Jr.) is ready to go to college for agriculture, but his father, now running the taxi service alone, insists it’s Uno’s duty to take over the family business. The two argue, and Uno sets off to pursue his dreams until a class project brings him back to the family junkyard, where he discovers his old pal. With the help of his estranged, pole-dancing uncle (Matheus Nachtergaele), the busted old taxi becomes something new entirely: the Carro Rei – King Car (Tavinho Teixeira). Following this success, the two realize that they can fix up every outdated car in the city, helping out the working-class people most affected by a new law that forbids any car over 15 years old from driving on the roads – including Uno’s new friends at the Agricultural Association. It all seems to be going well, until the cars show signs that they just might have an agenda of their own.

Carro Rei/King Car is a funny but biting commentary on the rampant classism and inequality in Brazil, especially in the majority-Black areas in the northeastern part of the country. Northeastern states like Bahia and Pernambuco, where the film takes place, are mostly agrarian, with economies that depend on farms more than anything else. When the working class gets screwed over, everyone but those rich enough to have other options gets screwed over. So something like, say, building a fleet of sentient cars doesn’t seem like the most outlandish answer to the question of how to live in such conditions, if the options are that or do nothing.

Overall, King Car is a uniquely Northern Brazilian film, with a prominent baião soundtrack and charming backlands setting. It’s a horror-comedy of the sort Americans might’ve made in the 1980s (complete with weird, deeply uncomfortable sex stuff), but with a timely message about classism, capitalism, and gentrification that everyone can take cues from, Brazilian or not.

Incredibly weird, very funny, surprisingly earnest, and all too relevant, King Car is definitely one to see (as long as you’re not epileptic or otherwise sensitive to flashing lights and strobe effects!) when it releases on January 7th, 2022. Just don’t drink the blue gasoline.

8 out of 10