A Mother’s Embrace: ’90s-set Brazilian horror film brings the mud and blood

A few years ago, I had the chance to visit the set of the Brazilian horror film The Trace We Leave Behind (a.k.a. O Rastro), which didn’t quite get the big international release it was originally supposed to, but did turn out to be a cool movie. You can read my review at THIS LINK. The Trace We Leave Behind turned out so well, I’m very glad to hear that producer André Pereira has made a new horror film, this time teaming up with History of the Occult director Cristian Ponce for A Mother’s Embrace.

Variety got their hands on a couple first-look images from A Mother’s Embrace, and those can be seen at the bottom of this article.

Directed by Ponce from a script he wrote with Pereira and Gabriela Capello, this film is set in 1996, during one of the biggest storms to ever hit Rio de Janeiro. The story follows a team of firefighters trying to evacuate a nursing home at risk of collapsing. But its mysterious residents have other plans.

Pereira provided the following statement: “Rio is known for its warm weather and beaches, but it also has this history of tropical storms and floods. When it rains, it pours. We wanted this rain to feel different. Different from how it feels, say, in North American films. Here, rain is weird, it’s still hot and humid. For our makeup department, it meant a lot of sweat. Luckily, Cristian was always saying that he didn’t want these characters to be too pristine. In our film, rain is not soothing. It doesn’t make things better – it just makes them worse.“

Ponce added: “One of our biggest influences is John Carpenter, who always tells stories about people stuck in some places they cannot escape. We try to create our own mythology here. You could say that these people, who form a cult, are trying to live a ‘better’ life. But what it means can be very subjective.“

The focus is on building dread rather than splashing gore around, but Ponce did say, “There is mud… and eventually blood.“

Marjorie Estiano, Chandelly Braz, Javier Drolas, Maria Volpe, Mel Nunes, and Reynaldo Machado star in A Mother’s Embrace, which was produced by Pereira through his company Lupa Filmes, with Morbido Group’s Pablo Guisa Koestinger co-producing and Mariana Muniz executive producing.

A Mother’s Embrace sounds good to me, so I look forward to seeing how it’s going to turn out. I’m not familiar with History of the Occult, but Variety notes that it was “the highest-rated horror movie of 2021 on Letterboxd’s Year in Review roundup, as voted by users of the film rating social platform.”

Are you interested in A Mother’s Embrace? Let us know by leaving a comment below – and while you’re scrolling down, check out these images: