Leandro Hassum’s Walter ends up with a parrot clamped onto his tongue while several drumlines hammer away around him. Decider recounts that scene from Fenced In, Roberto Santucci’s Brazilian comedy about a man who leaves the city for the countryside after a nervous breakdown and lands next door to neighbors louder than the city he fled. The film is about noise, and it has one answer to every problem: put more screaming people in the room.

The setup fits in a breath. As Decider describes it, the film opens inside Walter’s skull, with synapses firing and sparking, and the critic notes that this is as good an explanation as any for his sensitivity to noise. That sensitivity forces him to quit his retail job selling drums and guitars, and his doctor tells him to leave the overstimulating city. He and his wife Joana (Júlia Rabello) move to a subdivision, plant a garden and raise chickens, without bothering to check who lives next door. Next door is Toninho (Maurício Manfrini), a samba musician who hosts dozens of drummers at his house to practice at 125 dB for hours on end. His wife Kelly (Marlei Cevada) is a recovering beauty queen whose shrill voice, in Decider’s words, makes Peg Bundy look like a portrait of poise and restraint. The Portuguese title, Vizinhos, translates as Neighbors. Netflix chose Fenced In for the English market because, as Decider points out, there are already too many films with the other name, from the Rogen and Byrne comedies to the Buster Keaton classic.

The comedy grows out of that clash, and what grows is a catalogue of bodily punishment. Common Sense Media itemizes the damage: the parrot bites Walter’s tongue and it stretches to an absurd length while everyone screams in panic; the bird is believed dead after Walter breaks its neck, then revived by an overpowered EKG charge; the family’s matriarch is presumed dead after Walter accidentally shoots her with a tranquilizer gun. Decider adds Walter covered in cat shit as the drumlines close in, and the neighbors’ grandmother repeatedly calling him simple-minded. The gags pile up and the plot stays parked. A film that wanted us to feel Walter’s torment would give him one quiet minute to lose, and this one never does.

One scene at least has a little mischief in it. At a dinner party, Common Sense Media notes, Walter gets the idea that Toninho is hinting that he and Kelly are swingers who want to sleep with Walter and Joana. A misunderstanding built on social embarrassment is something an audience can follow and squirm at, because everyone has sat at a table where one sentence landed wrong. The film spends it quickly and goes back to the drums.

The best thing in the film is Hassum, and that is not saying much. The German site film-rezensionen.de describes Walter as angry, often and about a great deal, and says nobody can accuse Hassum of failing to give his best as he flies off the handle and takes every misstep by his neighbor as a personal declaration of war. The same critic concedes that parts of the ensemble work, then adds that a comedy has to be fun and that the film falters precisely there. I agree with both halves. Hassum plays a man whose frayed nerves are the only thing the film treats as real, and he commits completely, yet the script keeps handing him the same humiliation in a new costume. Manfrini and Cevada are cast as the opposite pole, the loud, friendly bon vivant and his shrill wife, and the script asks nothing else of them. They are pure volume. A joke that is all volume has nowhere to go once the audience has heard it.

Joana gets the least. Decider reports that she urges Walter to take more sedatives, that he warns her it will leave him impotent, and that she answers with a gasp. Common Sense Media adds that the prescription for his nerves feeds a running joke about erectile dysfunction. Decider says this is the moment we begin to see the vast personality flaws of both spouses beneath a seemingly sweet and loving marriage. It is the one thread with real friction in it, a couple whose tenderness might be hiding something, and the film lets it drop almost at once. Rabello’s character is left to react to her husband while the family next door takes over the screen. Julia Foti, Lucas Leto, Yves Miguel, Sophia Guedes, Dja Marthins and Vilma Melo fill out the rest of the cast, and none of them is given enough to change the picture.

The theme is where the film trips over itself. ReadySteadyCut argues that the story wants to teach a lesson, that we can work on ourselves and find a stress-free life without blaming outside forces, and that Walter victimizes himself by deciding the noise around him is his plight. That is a promising seed, because a man who has to learn to manage himself is a more interesting lead than one who is simply wronged. The film kills it by giving him neighbors who are cartoons. Every complaint Walter makes is justified, so the lesson has nothing to push against. The same critic admits to being kind on the theme and says it hardly surfaces. A Letterboxd reviewer puts it more sharply: if the film were an essay for Brazil’s national high school exam, it would score zero for straying from the topic.

The verdicts are blunt. Decider calls the film colorful in the sense that getting a bucket of paint dumped on your head is colorful, and says it is screeching and annoying. ReadySteadyCut places it at the bottom of the barrel, with the maturity of a toddler, a film that chooses chaos over any sense of story or dialogue, and says it is only good as noise for the background. The friendliest line comes from another Letterboxd reviewer, clara, who calls Hassum ‘our Adam Sandler’. It is a fan’s shorthand, and it says what the film is: a familiar star doing his routine at full tilt.

Common Sense Media warns that the film carries strong language throughout, drinking and cigars, and a mention that the previous occupant of the house died by suicide. That last detail sits badly beside the slapstick around it, and the film has no way of absorbing it.

A premise Decider already finds overly familiar needed fresh jokes, and the critics who saw the film report none. Fenced In is a lead who throws himself at every pratfall inside a story that never listens to itself. Skip it, unless you need something noisy playing in the next room.