A firefighter battling with PTSD, following a childhood trauma, returns to work weeks after she froze when her crew attended a major blaze. Her nervous bosses allow Ana to rejoin her rescue unit just as the city braces for a huge and life-threatening thunderstorm. But when her team is dispatched to what appears to be an old-people’s home in danger of collapse, freakish events conspire to force her suppressed anxieties to resurface, and to jeopardise everyone’s survival.
Brazilian neo-horror A Mother’s Embrace (Abraço de Mãe) is a strange mix of thriller, creature-feature and emotional allegory. Most of this is seen through the eyes of the damaged but resilient Ana (Marjorie Estiano), who’s internalised the psychological consequences of her estranged mother’s neglect. Scriptwriters Gabriela Capello, André Pereira and writer-director Cristian Ponce set the drama in mid-1990s Rio de Janeiro, although the unsettling ambience evokes little sense of a specific time and place.
The film is at its strongest when building an atmosphere of claustrophobic isolation and of entrapment, as the rain hammers down and the crew become separated–confronting their fates alone. What’s less successful is the attempt to build a Ripley-Newt style dynamic between Ana and the young girl Lia she finds in the house, which might offer her hope of redemption. The oddball residents, whose superficial concern with the well-being of their rescuers masks darker intent, don’t add much. Despite some weird, metaphorical visuals, the film’s mythology remains opaque. What the “thing beneath the cellar” wants or expects is left unexplained. Some will enjoy the fact that the script remains an exposition-free zone. Others may find that this frustrates more than it fascinates.
A MOTHER’S EMBRACE is release on digital platforms in the UK and Ireland from November 10th.
