Baixio das Bestas is a rural Brazilian sugarcane town where Auxiliadora, a 16-year-old girl, endures life under the brutal control of her grandfather Heitor, Fernando Teixeira who wields power through fear and relentless chores. This is a cycle rooted in a dark past—Auxiliadora is the child of an incestuous union between Heitor and his daughter, a trauma whose shadow stretches across every day. Heitor’s cruelty is constant: she labors from dawn, cooking and cleaning, earning money under his watchful eye, while the nights bring a new form of punishment that tests her endurance.
At night, Heitor drags Auxiliadora to the nearby town’s gas station where he forces her to stand naked behind a church. With this perverse display, truck drivers and other curious passersby are allowed to grope and pleasure themselves for a fee, a chilling performance orchestrated by the patriarch to assert control and profit from her body.
Into this bleak landscape arrives Cicero, a young man from a relatively well-off family who pays Heitor to observe Auxiliadora and becomes consumed by an obsessive fixation. Cicero belongs to a circle of privileged youths—Everardo, who leads the pack, and their friends—who spend their days in reckless revelry, drinking and visiting Dona Margarida’s brothel. The brothel is run by Dona Margarida, with workers including Bela and Dora; Bela, a prostituted woman, is played by Dira Paes and Dora is portrayed by Hermila Guedes. Bela, weary of the cruelty of Everardo and his crew, voices a longing for something gentler—a home and a partner who might offer stability rather than exploitation.
Auxiliadora’s already precarious life grows more perilous as Heitor tries to keep Maninho, a local laborer who has taken an interest in Auxiliadora, away. Heitor warns him off and berates him when he appears drunk, clinging to a wary control over his granddaughter’s future. The town’s dark undercurrents intensify when Cicero drives past Auxiliadora with his friends, a tense moment that ignites a broader pattern of predation and violence that threads through the story.
The night of the brothel’s “party” becomes a brutal turning point. Everardo approaches the women with a brutal appetite, groping several of the prostitutes and forcefully undressing Bela, who resists him. He ultimately drags Bela into a bedroom and rapes her while his companions cheer him on, a savage act that ends with him stomping Bela’s head and leaving her gravely injured. The brutality doesn’t end there: the following weekend, Dora and Ceica recall the incident with grim glee, and Dora herself is later assaulted at the cinema by Everardo and two others, with Everardo sodomizing her with a club before leaving her behind, a horrifying sequence that testifies to the pervasive cruelty of the group.
In the midst of this violence, Heitor continues to use Auxiliadora as a spectacle, one night sending her alone to town to display herself nude under the gaze of the gas station’s spectators, who pay to touch her. The event culminates when Cicero, who has grown increasingly possessive, abducts Auxiliadora at gunpoint, driving her to a field where he rapes her, a moment that cements the ongoing pattern of abuse surrounding her life.
Auxiliadora flees home in the wake of the assault, and Heitor’s reaction is a storm of curses and blame, condemning her for promiscuity and attempting to beat her further. In the aftermath, a group of maracatu dancers bursts into Heitor’s house, and, shortly after, Heitor appears to suffer a heart attack. The community’s sharp turn from violence to concern underscores the fragility of each character’s humanity in this harsh world. Heitor lingers, dying in a coma, while Auxiliadora leaves for the town, where she begins working as a prostitute at the gas station, with Dona Maria offering care and support.
As the townspeople reckon with what happened, Mario from the village—Mestre Mário, portrayed by João Ferreira—expresses a rare sense of possibility, suggesting he would be willing to give Auxiliadora a home as her husband. In the end, the grim weather mirrors the mood: the rain seems to be getting worse, casting a dozen more drops of sorrow over a story haunted by exploitation, memory, and the hope for something gentler to come.
