Curator Watchlist
A sharp, humane class drama with real bite: intimate enough to feel lived-in, but pointed enough to land as social critique. It balances humor, tension, and emotional payoff while turning a domestic setting into a revealing portrait of inequality, motherhood, and privilege.
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 1h 52m
Director: Anna Muylaert
Starring: Regina Casé, Camila Márdila, Karine Teles
After leaving her daughter Jessica in a small town in Pernambuco to be raised by relatives, Val spends the next 13 years working as a nanny to Fabinho in São Paulo. She has financial stability but has to live with the guilt of having not raised Jessica herself. As Fabinho’s university entrance exams approach, Jessica reappears in her life and seems to want to give her mother a second chance. However, Jessica has not been raised to be a servant and her very existence will turn Val’s routine on its head. With precision and humour, the subtle and powerful forces that keep rigid class structures in place and how the youth may just be the ones to shake it all up.
Anna Muylaert
Regina Casé, Camila Márdila, Karine Teles
A sharp, humane class drama with real bite: intimate enough to feel lived-in, but pointed enough to land as social critique. It balances humor, tension, and emotional payoff while turning a domestic setting into a revealing portrait of inequality, motherhood, and privilege.
The Second Mother is one of those dramas that makes a familiar setting feel newly charged. By placing most of its action inside a wealthy São Paulo household, it turns everyday routines into a study of power: who belongs where, who gets to move freely, and who is expected to stay in their place. The film’s great strength is how natural it feels while quietly exposing a deeply entrenched social order.
Regina Casé gives Val a weary warmth that makes the character instantly believable, and Camila Márdila brings a bracing directness as Jessica, the daughter who refuses to accept the unspoken rules. Their relationship gives the film its emotional core, but the movie is just as interested in the discomfort their reunion causes inside the house. That tension is handled with precision and a dry sense of humor that keeps the film from becoming didactic.
What lingers is the way the film connects private life to larger structures without losing sight of individual feeling. It’s compassionate toward its characters, but never soft on the system that shapes them. The result is a smart, accessible drama that feels both specific to Brazil and broadly resonant.
annamarins (5★) · 3685 likes
O anti-petismo nasceu quando a Jessica passou pra FAU, e o Fabinho não.
Jorge Jr (4.5★) · 2857 likes
como deve ser a experiência de assistir isso estando na posição de patrão?
agatha (5★) · 2292 likes
se eu pego essa bárbara na rua
Sandro Serpa (5★) · 2129 likes
Ainda estou bem chapado pelo filme mas me arrisco a dizer que Anna Muylaert fez "o" filme sobre os anos Lula. Tudo que vimos mudar no país, o acesso ao estudo e à dignidade que os pobres, negros e nordestinos tiveram e a esperança de que isso possa nos transformar num país melhor tá no filme de modo cristalino. Mas, é claro, o filme é muito mais do que isso e qualquer abordagem puramente ideológica seria redutora. Impressiona o domínio… more
brvnks (4.5★) · 1625 likes
esses playboy num pode nem pegar a própria água ela devia era ter cagado nessa piscina
A razor-sharp class satire that turns household space into a battleground of privilege, labor, and resentment.
An intimate portrait of domestic work, memory, and class hierarchy told with patience and visual grace.
A child’s-eye social drama that finds warmth and tension in everyday life and material circumstance.
A foundational neorealist story about labor, dignity, and the pressure of economic precarity.
A humane family drama about survival, belonging, and the hidden structures that define kinship.
Bright on the surface but deeply aware of class instability, parental absence, and fragile shelter.
A sharp, emotionally observant family drama about resentment, identity, and shifting loyalties.
A tense family gathering where buried power dynamics and long-denied truths come to the surface.
A devastatingly human study of institutions, dignity, and the indifference built into systems.
A morally layered domestic drama where class, duty, and family pressure collide in everyday life.
A restrained family drama that explores grief and emotional distance with great subtlety.
A moving Brazilian road drama centered on maternal absence, care, and the search for connection.
class inequality, domestic labor, mother-daughter relationship, social mobility, privilege, family separation, coming of age, urban Brazil
social drama, class conflict, domestic worker, mother daughter, Brazilian cinema, family tension, realism, humor and pathos, urban setting, social critique