RIGA IFF: Mātes laime

Johanna Moder
Mother’s Baby
Mutterglück
AT, CH, DE 
2025, 107’, de
Age 16+

 

Forty-something Julia is a successful conductor who – together with her husband Georg – is yearning to have a baby. Dr Vilfort and his private fertility clinic are their last hope. The white-coated benefactor refers to it as an “experimental method”, and the couple is ready to take the risk. Soon, Julia is expecting. But the birth comes with complications. Immediately after delivery, the newborn must be handed over to specialists – and when mother and child are reunited, Julia begins to spiral into alienation and paranoia. What if all signs point to this not being her baby, and the longed-for happiness is a delusion?

 

​​The topic of motherhood and its taboos is in the air – increasingly charged, critical, and organically embedded across cinematic genres. Austrian director Moder fits right into the zeitgeist with a postnatal depression thriller that premiered in the main competition of the Berlinale. Together with actors Maria Leuenberger, Claes Bang and others, she explores the tropes of paranoia, isolation, “switched-at-birth”, the eccentric doctor, the overly familiar midwife, and more and more – just enough to entertain audiences in living rooms of discomfort with the comfiest seats. But the agenda of the film, sharing a territory with Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Eraserhead (1977), is an attempt to sum up the corporeal and psychological experience of womanhood, while interrogating cinema’s own relationship with mother’s role and its stereotypes.