A Mother's Embrace aka Abraço de Mãe (Brazil 2024: Dir Cristian Ponce)

It's 1996. Ana (Marjorie Estiano) is a firefighter in Rio de Janeiro, returning to duty after a period in which she was given a leave of absence following the death of her mother, which affected her performance at work. To put it mildly.

Still clearly traumatised and experiencing fleeting visions of a mother from which she was estranged (following an abusive incident in her childhood, alluded to in the film's 1973 prologue), Ana is welcomed back into the ranks, but the fire service is too overwhelmed for a slow reintegration. 

The crisis facing the team isn't fire, but its elemental opposite; water. Successive rainy seasons in Rio de Janeiro have killed and displaced thousands. Ana and her fellow firefighters are summoned to a call at a nursing home on the outskirts of town, São Cristóvão, where Ana grew up. When they attend, they find an old, crumbling house full of residents in a poor state of health and hygiene, most almost catatonic. 

Outside a new storm begins to assert itself, necessitating the evacuation of the residents from the already leaking building. But none of the staff, headed up by the wheelchair bound Drika (Ângela Rabello) and younger manager Ulisses (Javier Drolas) seem in any hurry to leave. The team's attempts to rescue the old folk (and a small child, played Maria Volpe) results in their being trapped in the house, while Ana discovers the truth of what's happening, which links back to her mother.

Ponce's stylish and creepy feature, his first since 2020's History of the Occult, is an exercise in confusion and claustrophobia. Estiano's performance is the standout here; convincing in her trauma, her commitment to her job in the face of natural (and supernatural) danger consistent and believable.

There is a refreshing lack of clarity in what's happening, even when events are taking a distinctly Lovecraftian turn towards the end of the movie. It's best to revel in the nightmarish atmosphere of the thing (which reminded me of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's 2007 movie REC), particularly the crumbling, waterlogged nursing home set; locating the movie within the very real natural disasters of the Rio de Janiero floods adds a frisson of authenticity. A Mother's Embrace is very much its own film and its own world, and that can only be a good thing. Excellent stuff.

A Mother's Embrace is on UK and Ireland digital platforms from 10 November.

Lilith's Awakening (US 2016: Dir Monica Demes)

Lucy is a bored and distracted girl, working at a service station in the wilds of sleepy mid America. Her husband Jonathan is more worried about a forthcoming dinner with his boss Renfield than his increasingly distant wife. Lucy has a guy on the side, Arthur, who is clearly more sexually involved with Lucy than she is with Jonathan. But Lucy doesn’t seem particularly interested in either man, and when she chooses not to show up for a midnight tryst with Arthur he instead falls victim to a strange kohl-eyed guitar-wielding exotic woman who sucks his blood. This mysterious vampire, Lilith, has previously appeared in Lucy’s dreams, triggering her period (a rare splash of colour in this otherwise monochrome film), but it’s only when Lucy tries to locate the missing Arthur and sees a drawing of the vampire in his trailer that she starts to believe Lilith might be more than a figment of her imagination. “I saw her in my dreams, and now she’s coming for me” she says. And she’s right.

The stunning black and white palette and strikingly haunting visuals of Lilith Awakens announces the latest in a small sub-genre of stylishly made films concerning contemporary female vampires, which include Michael Almereyda’s 1994 part toy camera filmed Nadja and Abel Ferrara’s gritty 1995 movie The Addiction. More recently Ana Lily Amirpour’s splendid 2014 film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night featured an Iranian female vampire on the lookout for lowlife victims in a Hopper-esque Californian landscape, and it is to this last film that Lilith’s Awakening owes a significant stylistic debt. Intriguingly Monica Demes, the movie’s Brazilian born writer/producer/director, developed this film within the David Lynch MFA film program, so as you’d expect the movie also looks to his inspiration for many of its visual touches.

Lilith Awakens is a slow burning mood piece of a film. Every shot is exquisitely framed, and the bleakness of the Iowa landscape recalls the bleached Texan environment of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film The Last Picture Show. As you may have picked up, Demes uses a number of character names from the Bram Stoker novel Dracula (Lucy’s boss is even called Abe Helsing) and while this may initially seem a little clumsy, the ultimate effect is to weave this inspiration into the strangeness of the events on screen. The other standout is the soundtrack, which mixes Brazilian musician David Feldman’s brooding score with a wash of environmental sounds – fox cries have never sounded so scary, believe me – to great effect. Strong performances from newcomers Sophia Woodward and Barbara Eugenia as, respectively, Lucy and Lilith, keep the film from feeling like an exercise in cinematography. This is an enigmatic, enthralling and occasionally very unsettling debut from Demes, which will hopefully get a big screen run in the UK – it’s where it should be seen.