Portuguese director João Canijo’s final two films were made back to back, a couple of years before he died. Mal Viver (Bad Living) is the sister of Viver Mal (Living Bad). Taking this one as evidence, they’re a chilly duo, with passion roiling away beneath and a reminder that there’s nothing quite so unpleasant as a family that’s gone to the bad.
Both are set in the same hotel, but come at it from different directions. Here, the focus is on the family that runs the place; the other part focuses on some of the guests, only glimpsed in Mal Viver – just to be clear I have not seen Viver Mal and this info about the second film is from a press release.
Detached, static, stuck, this is a snapshot of a family whose hotel has seen better days, caught at the moment when Salomé (Madalena Almeida) the estranged daughter of neurasthenic mother Piedade (Anabela Moreira) returns to the family she barely knows. Salomé’s father has just died, we learn early on, but Piedade did not attend the funeral, not even to support her daughter, who’d been living with her ex-husband. She’d not even offered to go and pick her up. Piedade has headaches and spends much of her time in bed.
Now, back among the family, the almost-adult Salomé slots into a matrix of unresolved conflict, between mother Piedade and grandmother Sara (Rita Blanco), but also roping in aunt Raquel (Cleia Almeida) and Ângela, the employee who’s been there a long time and does most of the work.
There is clearly beef here but it’s hard to work out what it is. Could it be something to do with everyone hating Piedade’s theatrics? Is it more about Salomé’s inheritance, and how it’ll affect them all? Is it the clandestine relationship between Raquel and Ângela (Vera Barreto)? Or the controlling grandmother? Or the fact that the hotel is going bust? As Canijo’s camera lurks in corridors, eavesdropping in the same way that most of the film’s characters seems, he throws down a challenge – work out what’s going on here. Hints are dropped, bombs too, here and there.
Bergman’s quietly explosive films about relationships falling apart are an influence. But so, says Canijo, is Strindberg. Which means drama borne out of unequal power dynamics and the shaky maintenance of control. Canijo attacks it as slow cinema, with a coolly static camera’s elaborately long takes. With little in the way of incidental music to guide us, emotions are hinted at rather than stated, and revelations emerge gradually without emotional grandstanding.
For instance, daughter Salomé’s (misfiring?) attempts to connect to her mother – nuzzling up to her on the sofa at one point, getting into the pool while her mother is doing her daily lengths before the smattering of visitors are up. But the mother either does not want to play along or is afraid to. What is her problem?
Canijo’s working method is similar to Mike Leigh’s – plant the seed of an idea and then workshop the material into existence using a regular stable of actors. The characters develop as the actors rehearse, hence the co-writer credits for the cast, who are all intensely effective.
As for the guests who will turn up in the other film, we get a look at some of them, like a mother and her insufficiently ambitious actress daughter, plus the daughter’s girlfriend. Another bag of crazy, another family going entirely wrong.
This is the first film I’ve seen by Canijo, 68 when a heart attack took him. It’s superb – bleak and unsparing in its depiction of cruelty and venality yet with a feeling for its (misunderstood) characters that saves it from being a miseryfest. I’m looking forward to Viver Mal.
Mal Viver/Viver Mal box set – Watch/buy at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
