The best-known film by Cinema Novo leader António de Macedo brings the stark aesthetic and psychosexual intensity of Seventies European Westerns to its tale of repressed desire and violence in a remote fishing village. Centered on a fervently religious couple bound by an archaic vow of chasity, A Promessa crackles with tension when a stranger comes to town, a gypsy whose alternate traditions and understanding of intimacy threatens to upturn the entire village.