Emotions hide beneath the surface and horrors lurk behind unseen doors in Walter Salles’s Oscar-nominated tale of the Brazilian disappeared

The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised. This is a kind of mother-courage true story: the case of Eunice Paiva, a Brazilian woman who had to keep her family together and shield her five children from despair when her activist husband Rubens was brutally “disappeared” in 1971 by the military dictatorship. They refused even to admit he had been arrested, or later officially admit his death, in a state-sanctioned act of cruelty which was only finally acknowledged in the mid-90s after decades of campaigning, when the government issued a formal death certificate.

I’m Still Here is a drama which intelligently seeks to intuit the courageously maintained calm that Eunice imposes on herself and the children when the thuggish secret police arrive. Torres is effectively the still centre of a heartfelt but also somehow numbed and sometimes even strangely placid story. The film shows Eunice’s instinctive sense that overt outrage would be interpreted as leftist defiance and guilt. But it also shows her in some sense going into denial, rejecting the horror which is too much to process – even more horrifying as she herself is briefly taken into custody along with one of her children and tortured. She appears to be wordlessly telling everyone: just stay level, try to fabricate some normality at home, and soon it will all be over, and Rubens will return.