Malaise and horror in Mormaço

Body, city, and neoliberal politics in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

The article analyzes Mormaço (Marina Meliande, 2018) as an example of social horror in contemporary Brazilian cinema, examining the articulation between genre conventions and the conflicts engendered by the advance of neoliberal policies. Set in Rio de Janeiro on the eve of the 2016 Olympic Games, the film follows a public defender involved in the resistance against the eviction of Vila Autódromo, a community threatened by real estate speculation and state violence. At the same time, she is forced to leave her apartment in an affluent area of the city and becomes afflicted by a mysterious skin disease. The article argues that, by drawing on the fantastic and body horror, the film seeks to establish an analogy between body, city, and economy, through which it renders perceptible the forms of violence produced by neoliberal rationality. Anchored in a middle-class point of view, this analogy generates an ambivalent discourse on the middle class itself, which appears simultaneously in solidarity with popular struggles and comfortably implicated in the mechanisms of exclusion that produce them. It is further argued that this ambivalence permeates the materiality of the film’s images, which frequently stimulate a sensory experience of discomfort marked by tactility, the visual motif of the stain, and the indeterminacy/dissolution of form. Finally, the article situates Mormaço within the context of Brazilian cinema of the 2010s, placing it in dialogue with Aquarius (2016), The Cambridge Squatter (2016), and Hard Labor (2011).