General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Second Mother

The Second Mother (Portuguese: Que Horas Ela Volta?, literally "What Time Does She Come Back?") is a 2015 Brazilian comedy-drama written and directed by Anna Muylaert. It follows Val, a live-in housekeeper from Pernambuco who has raised her wealthy employers' son in São Paulo for thirteen years while her own daughter, Jéssica, grew up far away in the northeast; the daughter's arrival to take university entrance exams unsettles the household's class hierarchy.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	Que Horas Ela Volta?, Brazil, 2015; written and directed by Anna Muylaert¹
Genre and length	Comedy-drama; 114 minutes per the Brazilian distributor, 112 minutes per several international listings¹^•²
Cast	Regina Casé (Val), Camila Márdila (Jéssica), Karine Teles (Bárbara), Lourenço Mutarelli (Carlos), Michel Joelsas (Fabinho)¹
Awards	Special Jury Prize for Acting at Sundance for Regina Casé and Camila Márdila; Panorama audience award for best fiction at the Berlin Film Festival¹
Oscar submission	Brazil's entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2016 Academy Awards³
Reception	98% Tomatometer from 89 reviews and 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes; US gross of $375.7K⁴
Brazilian attendance	About 470,000 admissions by October 2015 per Folha; an Ancine figure of 454,000 is cited in academic work³^•⁵

Spoilers

Plot and characters

Val (Regina Casé) leaves her daughter Jéssica with relatives in Pernambuco and moves to São Paulo to work as a nanny for an upper-class family. Thirteen years later she has become a second mother to the boy Fabinho (Michel Joelsas), who as a teenager often sleeps beside the live-in maid, while his birth mother Bárbara (Karine Teles) is a distant fashion figure and his father Carlos (Lourenço Mutarelli), addressed as "Doctor" by everyone, is too helpless to fetch a soft drink from the fridge.¹^•²

The action begins when Jéssica (Camila Márdila), now a teenager, travels to São Paulo to take the vestibular, the university entrance examination. Her strong personality disturbs the family's social hierarchy and questions the rigidity of prevailing social roles.¹ Jéssica is bright and hopes to study architecture, an ambition that offends the host family; she refuses the pre-established hierarchical order whose rules she does not know, moves into the guest room instead of her mother's humble quarters, and befriends Fabinho and his friends.²^•⁶ Val, proud to "know her place", repeatedly scolds her daughter: "When they offer us something, we're not supposed to take it."²

The title question, "Que horas ela volta?", is asked in the film, for the first time, by Fabinho about his mother; the English title The Second Mother refers to the fact that the maid has a more intense maternal relationship with Fabinho than his own mother does.⁷^•⁸

Themes

The film is a portrait of class conflict in contemporary Brazil, told through the daily life of a São Paulo mansion and centered on the figure of the live-in domestic worker. Reviewers noted its observation of invisible but firm class barriers in everyday activities, from eating the master's ice cream to swimming in his pool, and the recurring image of the door separating the kitchen from the dining room.⁹^•¹⁰ Muylaert herself called it a political film and framed its questions as "Can there really be an upbringing without affection? Can affection be bought? And, if so, at what price?"¹¹^•¹²

Academic commentary has read the film as depicting the paid outsourcing of care, in which Val is a second mother to Fabinho while her own daughter was raised by another woman, and as a study of gender, class, and symbolic violence in Brazilian domestic labor.⁷^•¹³ Brazilian critics were divided: Folha's Inácio Araujo praised its subtlety, while a colleague in the same paper called it a propagandistic caricature.¹⁴^•¹⁵

Production and release

Muylaert, a São Paulo-born screenwriter and director born in 1964, had previously directed Durval Discos (2002), É Proibido Fumar (2009), and Chamada a Cobrar (2012); she finished filming Que Horas Ela Volta? in February 2014.¹⁶^•³ Production companies included Gullane and África, with producers Fabiano Gullane, Débora Ivanov, Anna Muylaert, Gabriel Lacerda, and Caio Gullane; Oscilloscope Laboratories distributed the film in the United States, where it opened in limited release on August 28, 2015.¹^•⁴ The Brazilian distributor lists a release date of July 27, 2015, and a rating of not recommended for children under 12; the US rating was R for some language and brief drug use.¹^•⁴

Reception and recognition

The film won the Special Jury Prize for Acting at Sundance for its two leads and the Panorama audience award at the Berlinale, and it was chosen by Brazil's Ministry of Culture to compete for a nomination in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 2016 Oscars.¹^•³ Muylaert was the first woman in 30 years to represent Brazil in that pre-selection, after Suzana Amaral with A Hora da Estrela; sources date Amaral's film to 1985 or 1986.³^•¹⁶ The National Board of Review elected it one of the five best foreign-language films of the year.⁵

Commercially it was Muylaert's largest success, drawing about 470,000 Brazilian moviegoers by October 2015, far beyond the audiences of her earlier features, and grossing $375.7K in the United States.³^•⁴ Critics' consensus on Rotten Tomatoes describes compelling characters serving an artfully drawn, thought-provoking story; the Los Angeles Times called it "a soap opera with a social conscience," while the Christian Science Monitor found the ending too engineered.⁴^•¹²^•¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2015 to 2019 › Drama films 2015 and 2016 › Released in 2015

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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