An uneasy triangle forms when a young man in trouble with his criminal cohorts shacks up at a seedy roadside sex hotel in a Brazilian beach town.

Two young men fight playfully on a beach surrounded by rocky hills in the opening moments of Karim Aïnouz’s Motel Destino, their tanned bodies glistening under the scorching sun of Brazil’s northeastern coast. Before it’s revealed that the pair are brothers close in age, the scene sets up a torrid queer undercurrent that ripples throughout this erotic thriller even though the three principal characters enmeshed in a dark romantic triangle are all ostensibly straight.

At the top of that list are the intoxicating visuals of Hélène Louvart, giving the film palpable heat, physicality and danger that recall the rising-star French cinematographer’s work on Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats. The striking compositions shot on 16mm have grainy textures pulsing with vitality and electrified by bold splashes of saturated color. The look is like neon even in daylight, adding considerably to the movie’s erotic charge.

That evening at a beach bar, Heraldo hooks up with a stranger (Isabela Catão) and takes her to Motel Destino for a wild night. But once he passes out, she makes off with his money, leaving him locked in the room with no way to pay. Dayana (Nataly Rocha), who runs the seedy roadside joint with her older husband Elias (Fabio Assunção), eventually releases him. But Heraldo makes it to town just in time to see Jorge’s dead body being carted off after his botched attempt to carry out the Bambina job solo.

Aïnouz and screenwriter Wislan Esmeraldo keep the set-up tight, dispensing with unnecessary exposition. The tragedy also serves to fuel Heraldo’s dreams of Jorge, adding the weight of guilt, while fear factors in via his terror of Bambina’s semiautomatic-toting goon Rafael (David Santos) coming after him. Heraldo gets lucky with a hideout when he returns to Motel Destino and Dayana takes him on as a handyman, putting his electrician skills to work.

Production designer Marcos Pedroso renders the sex hotel as a place so sordid you can practically smell it — and that’s even before you see the donkeys humping in the yard. (Nothing like the sight of a whopping mule penis to hammer home a movie’s fascination with lust.) The rooms are bathed in a lurid red glow, as is the central corridor from which staff secure payment through window hatches that allow for the occasional bit of voyeurism. Security cameras also play into that element, uncovering secrets later on.

Naturally, Heraldo and Dayana soon start having clandestine trysts while boorish hothead Elias is elsewhere. He’s busy with plans to build an extension and add more rooms, but it doesn’t take him much time to figure out what’s going on. Elias has already threatened to kill Dayana when she tried to run off in the past, so there’s no telling what he’ll do once he discovers he’s being cheated on.

Aïnouz teases out the possible scenarios, stirring in homoerotic tension when Elias starts getting drunk and handsy around Heraldo. It’s clear the older man is no stranger to crime, even before we witness his method of dealing with a motel guest’s inconvenient heart attack. The identity of that guest and his link back to an earlier event is one of the screenplay’s more schematic touches.

Even so, the movie’s overripe sensuality pairs well with the menace of isolated settings like a wind farm on a lonely stretch of beach at night. Likewise the simmering threat of violence or sexual abuse.