For a film that critics have described as ‘irreverent’, ‘wild’, and ‘imaginative’, it’s downright shocking how regressive Diamantino is. Watching this conjures images of over-privileged men like Bret Easton Ellis railing against millennial outrage and David Brooks’ hand-wringing about a coddled generation. Digging beneath the film’s superficial parody of far-right politics, it becomes clear that Diamontino swims in these same waters. Rather than being a commentary on the vapidness of celebrity, climate change, and the refugee crisis, it pivots instead to what the directors Abrante & Schmidt must have seen as a visionary U-turn: A full-throated defense of an over-privileged man from a world dominated by women who are bent on destroying his way of life. Spoilers to follow.

In the film, Diamontino Matamouros (Carlato Cotta), an obvious stand-in for soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, sees his world change after learning about the refugee crisis. However, his attempts to help the situation are perpetually thwarted by women who are depicted as such heartless shrews that even Woody Allen would cringe. Diamantino is emasculated by his twin sisters who mock his relationship with his father, a woman talk show host humiliates him before the nation, women government agents spy on him, (one dons a nun’s habit to trick him while another pretends to be a refugee to sneak in his house), a woman scientist pumps his body full of hormones at the discretion of an evil mastermind: a woman in a wheelchair. This is the stuff of Tucker Carlson’s nightmares but the film is more than happy to ensure that all of these women get their comeuppance. By the end, most have been violently murdered, and a lesbian government agent has been sexually conquered. In a pivotal scene, a final cinematic flourish depicts the wheelchair-bound mastermind keeling over dead, her lipstick perversely blending with her blood as it oozes out of her mouth. The camera pulls back to see Diamantino’s naked masculine frame tower above her brandishing his sword. Good fucking grief.

It’s also particularly egregious that this woman is a Dr. Strangelove reference, in that it only emphasizes the dissonance at hand. In Kubrick’s film, General Ripper who orders a preemptive nuclear strike, rails against a “conspiracy to sap and drain our precious bodily fluids.” He admits that this realization came to him after having sex: “I do not avoid women…but I do deny them my essence.” Ripper says as he puffs on a giant cigar. In Strangelove he is a maniac and an idiot, but in Diamantino this conspiracy is realized, as we literally watch our noble protagonist being robbed of his essence by a woman scientist. Kubrick posits that these insecure hyper-masculine lunatics will destroy the world, while Abrantes & Schmidt on the other hand project a reality where pure-hearted men have been emasculated and need to prove themselves as men to set things right.