Stream It Or Skip It?

When a show is so dark that you say to yourself, “man, this show is bleak,” you have to really try to figure out if you’re going to stay with the show. It’s draining to deal with so much bleakness, but sometimes you just want to wade into it waist-deep. But other times, you want to keep watching, thinking that some light may peek through the clouds. That’s what we’re hoping with a new Brazilian crime thriller.

Opening Shot: We see the closeup of a girl wearing an earring, then two teenagers walking on a beach.

The Gist: The girl, Janalice (Domithila Cattete), then leads the boy through some woods, they stop, and she kneels down to give him oral sex. He has his phone on the entire time, saying the two of them can watch the steamy video later.

When she arrives at school that Monday, though, the video has already been seen by everyone, which leads Janalice to throw a punch at the boy she thought she could trust. It’s even filtered out to her father, who works on a ferry and sees some passengers watching it. Janalice’s mother, a very religious woman, is incensed; she hits her daughter and decides that she’s better off staying with her sister in Belém and work in her restaurant.

In the meantime, we see another ferry get boarded by pirates, reluctantly led by a young man named Preá (Lucas Galvino). He just wants to get down to business and hijack the ferry’s cargo, but he has to contend with wild cards like Gigante (David Santos), who thinks it’s his right to be able to sexually assault female hostages rather than actually get the cargo they boarded the ship for.

In a store that’s situated on the river, Mariangel (Marleyda Soto) is trying to save up to move her family to São Paulo, where her son’s sexuality will be more accepted. Her husband, the boy’s father, still thinks that their son “fancies” other men, but Mariangel knows that he was born that way, and there is no way he can live either on the river or even in Belém without being in danger from homophobes.

In Belém, Janalice is befriended by a street teen named Dionette (Adermara), who is protecting a boy named Miltinho (Luca Dan). Miltinho has been looking for his missing sister, and Janalice thinks that she might have been trafficked into prostitution, which happens with a lot of teens in the area. She wants a phone so they can search for her on the websites offering their services. The only one who has a phone, though, is Dionette’s boyfriend, and he happens to be on the lookout for new girls to provide to the “farm.”

Janalice is traumatized after she’s sexually assaulted by her aunt’s boyfriend, and tearfully calls her father and begs to be allowed home. But when she goes to meet Dionette’s boyfriend, she runs when he tries to force her to smoke crack, but is eventually captured. At the same time, Preá’s gang, led by Gigante, murder Mariangel’s husband and son after Gigante diverts the crew from a job, looking for some booze.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Rivers Of Fate is about as bleak as another recent Netflix series, In The Mud.

Our Take: Created by Stephanie Degreas, Fernando Garrido and , Bráulio Mantovani, Rivers Of Fate (original title: Pssica) takes most of its first episode to set up exactly what the story is really about. We’re introduced to Janalice, Preá and Mariangel in separate scenes, and we really wondered as the scenes played out, how everything is going to be connected, if at all. And while things start to come together by the end of the episode, there’s still a lot of room for the story to go different places.

Ultimately, Mariangel and Preá are going to look for Janalice, probably both separately and together, but we’re unsure of the reasons why just yet. Preá’s relation to the trafficking ring that captured Janalice is a little clearer, given that he knows the people who run the “farm” and that his gang’s horniness is mostly served by the prostitutes on that farm. Mariangel is connected to Preá via what Gigante and the rest of Preá crew did to her husband and son. But how they connect and why they decide to find Janalice still isn’t clear. There’s some sort of mysical element to it, as we hear the word “Pssica” whispered over and over, but that is just a vague notion at this point.

One overwhelming feeling we got while watching Rivers Of Fate is that it’s one heck of a bleak show. There’s lots of random killing, plenty of misogyny and homophobia, as well as drug use and sexual assault as a matter of course. We get that the show’s creators are trying to set up the hopelessness that surrounds people on the river and in Belém before the search for Janalice hopefully brings some humanity into the story. But, boy, we get the feeling it’s going to be a depressing slog to get to that point.

Sex and Skin: Some slight nudity, but sex is ever-present on this show, whether it’s consensual or not.

Parting Shot: As Janalice is put on a boat to who knows where, Dionette’s boyfriend asks her what her name is.

Sleeper Star: Ademara has a presence as Dionette that is partly funny, partly sad, but it does seem like the character is a force of nature.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re not quite sure why the fuzzy interstitials with descriptive phrases pop up. We get the ones with the names of characters, but not the rest of them. It feels like a choice made for style reasons and little else. There are also a couple of strangely-placed jump scares that seem to feel superfluous.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the bleakness of Rivers Of Fate, we’re intrigued enough about how the stories we were introduced to will come together with the mystical elements of the overall plot to keep watching.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.