FrightFest Glasgow review – Abraço de Mãe (A Mother’s Embrace)

FrightFest Glasgow review – Abraço de Mãe (A Mother’s Embrace)

In April and May, 1996, Rio de Janiero was assailed by storms and floods which added up to a major, city-wide disaster.  This exercise in Lovecraftian horror takes this real-life cataclysm as a backdrop but is mostly set in a single, structurally unsound old dark house.  Firefighter Ana (Marjorie Estiano) is cleared to return to active duty after two months of desk work prompted by an incident where a bad childhood memory – involving her just-dead mother – caused her to freeze up.  Ana is still occasionally seeing phantasms of her mother, who botched an attempt at murder-suicide when Ana was a little girl, which serve as ill omens.

With almost all the crews summoned to water-related emergencies, Ana’s outfit – bossed by tough Captain Dias (Val Perré) – is diverted from a minor incident to investigate a call which alleges that an old people’s home is about to fall down.  Arriving at the crumbling mansion, apparently a converted family home, the rescue workers are told by a wheelchairbound stern matriarch (Angela Rabello) that no one has called them and they aren’t wanted – then let in by a slightly more compliant manager (Javier Drollas).  Yes, water is pouring through holes in the ceiling and broken windows, and the inmates of the hostel are weirdly uncommunicative or simply odd.  However, things get more and more wrong – wormlike living tendrils slither, Ana’s crewmates are taken off the board one by one, the hostel staff are uncooperative to the point of hostility, and unaccountably some storm-assailed folk are desperate to get inside the dangerous house.

Eventually, Ana bonds with a scared little girl (Maria Volpe) who reminds her of her younger self but it’s a moot point that she’s any better equipped to keep her safe than her own mother was.  It’s more a study in escalating weirdness and wrongness than a scary action picture, with Estiano giving a powerful performance as an unusual heroine.  Too many Lovecraftian films default to evil seafood as the avatar of all evil, but this plays a bit with other odd notions to convey the insignificance of mankind in a hostile universe – a fairground attraction in the shape of a giant female (pregnant) body where Ana’s mother has her mental crisis … a cartoon octopus painting being destroyed by a significant fire which shapes Ana’s life … and something indescribable, odd and deep watery for the finale.