Johanna Moder’s newest work, the pervasively tense, darkly humorous “Mother’s Baby” is a striking example of control over tone for as long as it lasts. It almost gets to the finish line but gets tripped up in its closing moments with some choices that strip the story of its fundamental power: the postpartum depression’s gaping unknown.
An attempt and a struggle later, Julia (Marie Leuenberger) an orchestra conductor in her mid-life goes to a lauded fertility expert, Dr. Vilfort (Claes Bang). Rounded up with her husband Georg (Hans Löw), they are at a fancy clinic. He has promising methods and if all goes well, Julia should get pregnant. Things go fine till she gives birth at the doctor’s private clinic. Red flags instantly as her son gets whisked away for ‘emergency treatment’ as soon as he is born, never getting to meet the mother till the next day a whole day devoid of complication.
In each strange interaction during the conversations only Julia seems to notice each. These mounting signs all point to an inevitability in Julia’s mind that the baby she is so desperately trying to connect with and breastfeed is not her child. As Gerlinde, the midwife assigned to them by the clinic, makes over-familiar house calls, Georg seems none the wiser, placing a strain on their marriage and causing an itch at the back of Julia’s mind. These factors all but resolve Julia’s thoughts regarding her newborn baby and isolate her while drawing comparisons with the strange behavior of her unnaturally smiling baby and the smirking axolotls from Vilfort’s facility. Is there a possible connection?
If it were an outright horror film, the main character might head down a research rabbit hole. However, the creators approach Mother’s Baby as a work of gesture and suggestion, trusting the viewer to draw their own conclusions about the plot. Through surreal interactions and unexplained events, we are presented with the mother’s many possibilities, all while Leuenberger’s performance manages to ground the story.
The actress holds a strained and precarious balance, even during the absurd scenes where Moder has Julia interact (in wickedly funny two-shots) with an innocent baby whose mere existence seems to vex her.
While the film at times can be shocking in its humor, it roasts some deeper issues concerning the blame of early motherhood with razor-sharp wit. By attacking something as delicate and ungraspable as a mother’s first instinct laced with nurturing desire, and almost removing it from Julia’s make-up, “Mother’s Baby” uses sculpted tension the more it ventures into hybrid sub-genre territory, pausing just short of overwhelming release, but prolonging the delicious build-up for as long as possible. It does not hurt that Bang almost seems to slip into his former role of Netflix’s Count Dracula, giving each word a disarmingly menacing edge without ever revealing his ulterior motives.
The movie succeeds in juggling multiple subplots and sustaining momentum but fails to answer overarching questions, abstractly or otherwise. Its most sinister form lingers where some of its possible outcomes exist within locations sprawling with terrifying, claw-like canopies, and instances of drama that make Julia, along with the audience, question everything. Curiously, though, by the end “Mother’s Baby” adopts a far more definitive and literal (or at least, literal-minded) primary mode of expression, even though one cannot reasonably conclude that it captures in essence, the picture of reality, or completely devoid of a total break from it.
In either scenario, having both these options suddenly appear on the screen bifurcates the narrative into two equally pedagogical possibilities when its true power rests in the unresolved mysteries. Giving up such a feeling in exchange for something familiar strips the story of its most terrifying relief. On the other hand, the fact that so much of the film functions as intended up to this point is astonishing, particularly when considered alongside the Sundance premiere and fellow Berlin competition title, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You. Both indicate a compelling shift in the joints of the spine in the core of pregnancy and motherhood horror something much more profoundly internal and psychological and in the process, richly entertaining.
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