"O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra" was the first crime thriller written in Portuguese, by Eça de Queirós and Ramalho Ortigão in the 1870s. This movie picks up that plot, and adds Eça and Ramalho's real lives, together with the real lives of the people they based their novel on. Although fictionalized, the whole movie has a feeling of reality to it and is a nice epoch reconstruction.

Ramalho is kidnapped at night and demanded to medically tend to an Englishman shot in a Portuguese noble manor. From then on, the plot splits between Ramalho and Eça writing a fictionalized account of this incident and the events leading to it; and coincidentally the writers' fiction ends up being very near to what really happened with Rytmel and the Valadas family. Both worlds end up mixing, and in the end we don't know if the whole thing has really happened.

Good plot and direction, good or at least passable acting for most of the main cast (the rest are a bit wooden), a period piece and a story by Eça and Ramalho make this unmissable, even if it is not a cinema masterpiece.