A Mother's Embrace

We’ve come a long way with the notion of women as complete human beings who can hold down challenging jobs, perform tough physical tasks and exist independently of motherhood or their own mothers, but there’s still a chain of logic running throughout most Hollywood and independent films which sees women who try to live this way discovering that they’re happier in more traditional roles. A Mother’s Embrace, which screened as part of Beyond Fest 2024, flirts with this logic in multiple ways but proceeds to take it somewhere much more interesting by exploring maternality and the desire to return to the womb on a much grander and more overtly horrific scale.

Ana (Marjorie Estiano) has just returned to her firefighting duties after two months’ leave. The psychological troubles she experienced relate to her relationship with her mother, who, by this time, we have already seen in a flashback, trying to kill them both. The two have been separated for many years but sometimes Ana still thinks she sees her, young and fresh-faced, as if nothing was ever wrong. In the circumstances, she seems to have coped remarkably well. There is no trace of her mother’s illness in this practical, determined woman. Still, her older male colleagues worry about her. They seem to value her happiness more than she does herself. She values being useful. Early scenes, which show us something of the variety of the tasks firefighters undertake, make it clear how capable and resourceful she is.

In São Cristóvão, at the mouth of the Vaza-Barris River which flows through Northeastern Brazil, the primary challenge facing members of Ana’s profession is shifting from fires to floods. Rainfall has increased significantly in recent years due to changes in atmospheric circulation, and storms have become more violent and less predictable, such that flooding can occur suddenly with little time to prepare. With such a storm hitting the city during this film, Ana and two of her colleagues are dispatched to check out a care home whose residents may be at risk. What they find is a building in such a poor state of repair that it should probably have been evacuated years ago regardless. Ana immediately requests ambulances so that they can move people as safely as possible, but the weather is causing problems on the roads, and as she waits, odd little events lead her to wonder if there is not something equally dangerous going on inside.

“Has this place always been a care home?” she asks Drica (Ângelo Rebelo), the spiky elderly woman who owns the building.

“No,” says Drica. “It has always been a temple.”

With uncommunicative residents who drift around in a zombie-like trance, a girl who is desperate to get away, and something sinister underneath the rotting floorboards in the basement, it’s clear that trouble is on the way. The form it takes, however, is rather more imaginative than usual. Adjacent to this, the film presents a number of ambiguities. Rather than a simple struggle between good and evil, it focuses more on self-determination, with Ana fighting to have her own agency respected by others – and to feel confident about it herself.

An ambitious project, it sometimes over-reaches, and there are issues with pacing. The middle stretch involves quite a bit of wandering about with not much happening. Estiano is a strong lead, however, and watchable throughout. The murky cinematography, redolent of decay, draws viewers towards the film’s unsettling climactic images, which, partly as consequence, are much more effective than similar efforts made elsewhere in genre work this year. A Mother’s Embrace has an organic quality. Even its strangest elements feel convincingly part of the whole. Emerging as it does at a time of high anxiety about rising waters – and real threat – it uses genre elements to address the different ways we might be tempted to respond.