Marjorie Estiano is supremely watchable in this woozy Brazilian chiller, which fails to spring into life.
★★★☆☆
It’s been a particularly strong year for Brazilian cinema. Festival audiences paid due respect to films like The Secret Agent and I’m Still Here, the latter of which won Best International Feature at this year’s Oscars, and Hotel Destino caused a splash in cinemas with its tropical thrills. Now director Cristian Ponce continues the trend with A Mother’s Embrace: a suspense film which pays direct homage to John Carpenter, with a generous helping of Gothic seriousness.
When we are introduced to Ana (Marjorie Estiano), she is arguing for her firefighting position after losing composure and freezing in shock on a job. She remains haunted after losing her mother as a child, an incident disclosed in the hallucinatory prologue; visions of this memory persist into adulthood and pierce her steely resolve. The way that a spark of fiery trauma from this episode led Ana into her career is something the viewer is cleverly left to speculate about.
On duty on the eve of a historic rainstorm, Ana’s team are led to a crumbling nursing home after an anonymous call-out warns of collapse in the downpour. They must assess the building and evacuate if necessary, but the residents range from unreceptive to downright hostile. There’s no sign of medical care, and the matriarch greeting Ana is insistent they don’t need help. The longer the night stretches on, and the more unstable the situation becomes, the residents’ reluctance to leave—and what brought them there first—grows into a profound mystery.
Sadly, the film doesn’t reveal anything as transgressive as its opening, a genuinely chilling moment of pain. Like in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), a local fairground is heightened into a trippy location to set the tone for the following story. However, what emerges in the main plot is something quite different, a tour through horror tropes which overwhelms the more obscure fears. The patients are often unremarkably creepy stereotypes whose oddness and secrecy only really points one way.
A Mother’s Embrace is too indebted to its genre predecessors to take on a life of its own. The larger themes of family and generational trauma are not new, and the structural resemblance to Midsommar (2019) does the film no favours. It feels like the film strains more for smart visuals than effective scares, and although audiences may appreciate the mish-mash of horror ideas, it comes across more like a lack of conviction.
In the film’s favour, Ponce and his cinematographers craft an undeniable atmosphere, using the location to their advantage. The home itself is a fascinating structure; cracks snake across its walls as water pours through holes in the ceiling, while attention has been paid to creating a lived-in feel for the rooms. And of course, there’s a creepy cellar for good measure. While it does become a little schematic in cross-cutting between all three floors of the building, the film does well to make its geography clear.
Most positively, Marjorie Estiano does well in the role of Ana, whose submerged shock in the face of a demanding job is very believable. Her performance does more to sell the horror than the tired visions of her mother, especially when Ana pursues a mysterious girl into the house’s shadows. In sequences like this, the film leads into classic Gothic ghost stories: it is easy to be reminded of the shadowy architecture and towering lead performance in The Orphanage (2007). While the subtlety that this mode demands is an admirable quality, it is undone in the film’s later act, when the mystery of the original distress call must be resolved.
The Verdict
A Mother’s Embrace is an atmospheric horror film with some nice ideas, and its screenwriters have clearly enjoyed playing with genre expectations. Nonetheless, the film is ultimately defanged by its reliance on creepy and smartly-framed imagery. Estiano’s lead performance is just enough to keep it afloat.
Words by Max King
A Mother’s Embrace is out on digital platforms now.
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