A response of sorts to Phantom’s vision of desire and sexuality as purely physical expressions, Two Drifters offers an eccentric, ethereal and almost Romantic love story. The film derives its Portuguese title from the name of a lonely young woman stung by her boyfriend’s cruel departure and obsessed with her dead gay neighbor and his grieving lover Rui. Superimposing both aching losses, the deeply sensitive woman inserts herself ever more insistently into the Rui’s uncertain life. Rodrigues depicts the couple’s grief as an otherworldly love triangle as the woman increasingly comes to seem genuinely haunted, perhaps even possessed. Rodrigues’ mysterious film generates an almost palpable sense of the gaping absence and limboed desire left by the sudden departure of a loved one.