BEWARE BOIÚNA Review | Fantastic Fest 2026

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Things I love in movies: humanitarian missions, women murdering would-be rapists, nature rising up to destroy anything that harms it, and giant snakes. On paper, Mike P. Nelson’s Beware Boiúna is tailor made for my personal enjoyment. In execution, things look a little different. 

The film’s story follows med students Alli (Jessica Rothe), and Callum (Will Close) alongside Dr. Miguel (played by Juan Pablo Shuk and surely has a smarter character name that is simply not listed) on a humanitarian mission to bring malaria drugs across the Curuçá River. It’s a journey that would not be possible without the help of Raul (Jaime Newball) the captain of their ship alongside his trusty mechanic and surrogate daughter Lena (Kiana Madeira), who is tagging along to find her missing brother. On their first stop, they run afoul of “surveyors” Brennan Malloy (Logan Marshall-Green), and his would-be rapist brother, Shawn (Jackson Bews). Shawn doesn’t live very long, and his big brother immediately swears revenge against the women (That’s Alli and Lena) who killed him. As their expedition flees the surveyor and his small crew, they navigate their boat into Boiúna’s territory, putting every life in immediate risk. 

Alan B. McElroy and Tony Giglio’s script presents Boiúna as the protector of the river. When things are out of balance, she returns and she makes it every living thing’s problem. Boiúna decides who lives and who dies in order to restore balance to her home. This isn’t implied, this is a sentiment explicitly stated by both natives and Lena. You’d think that would mean that the white surveyors seeking to build on land that does not belong to them while on a mission to seek justice for a would-be rapist would be the first to go. You can then, of course, imagine the confusion when nearly all of the people specifically in her territory to help people start dropping like flies. 

Limited tolerance for a script establishing rules to immediately break them aside, Beware Boiúna isn’t particularly well shot, either. There’s a franticness to it that, though possibly intentional, mostly just ends up feeling like a cop out. The film didn’t have the budget to focus heavily on a giant snake, so the cinematography opts for a kind of crazed perspective that explains away why we don’t see more than her torso or tail for much of the runtime. At the very least, there are a couple of nice practical shots as we focus on human wounds ranging from disgusting to straight up gnarly. They’re just not enough to save the film from a technical perspective.

There’s really no limping back from the one-two punch of rough technical and an even rougher script, but Beware Boiúna does deliver a few sufficient scares in spite of itself. There’s a deep tension to the scene that inspired the film’s poster when Lena is stuck in muck, and there’s a delightful jump scare with a partially digested crocodile. The best kill of the film is the one you least expect, so we can’t really talk about it. Rest assured it’s delightfully mean and way earlier than you anticipate. 

The final nail in the coffin for Beware Boiúna is, admittedly, a personal frustration that I understand most people don’t share: don’t use the name of a legend if you’re not going to use that legend. Boiúna is a nocturnal shape shifting snake that scares away and occasionally disappears fishermen. She is frequently known as the keeper of the night before night even existed. She is very large. She is not the keeper of balance in the Amazon. You can avoid disrespecting the lore of a culture by simply using a geographic location rather than co-opting its stories and spitting out a far lesser version. (See also: the utterly unwatchable The Curse of La Llorona.)

Despite its many (avoidable) hurdles, Beware Boiúna ends passably. A longstanding quest is completed, a character reconnects with their roots, and rebels continue to fight against illegal gold mining along the Curuçá River. It’s a shame the rest of it struggles as much as it does, because there’s a good movie buried (deep) below the one that we got. 

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