My notes on Mom
Several recent horror films – Necromentia 2, The Taking of Deborah Logan, Ritual, She Will – have spun off from dementia, using the spooky old house/possession/family dysfunction of the traditional spook story to explore and elucidate a mental condition. Mom does the same for post-partum depression, with a startlingly effective and affecting performance from Emily Hampshire as a new mother who sinks further into her own mind in the wake of a childbirth which is as much of an explosion in her life as any ensuing tragedy.
Meredith (Hampshire) is frank about the physical effects of giving birth and being a nursing mother – a waddling walk as she’s unable to reaccustom herself to not being pregnant, a severely distended vagina, not even noticing that she’s expelling blood with milk – but the film also shows how everything else starts to get on her nerves. Her cheerfully caring husband Jared (François Arnaud) goes back to work and comes home to a mess every day with the sort of positivity that’s probably worse for his wife’s mental health than actual arguments would be. Peeping through curtains, she starts to think her gardening neighbours are spying on her. And baby Alex just doesn’t respond to her love and attention the way she’d like – she seems to prefer a phantom version of his slightly older self (Christian Convery) she starts seeing.
At some point, the situation spirals out of control and the film sticks with Meredith’s point-of-view so we can’t tell what’s real and what’s imagined – occasionally evoking the much artier family horror charades of mother! or Beau is Afraid but always getting back to being stuck in the house with the kid and escalating mental problems the protagonist can’t deal with. The multi-authored script – Philip Kalin-Hajdu wrote from a story by director Adam O’Brien from an idea by Albert I Melamed, Nathan Oliver and Taylor Sardoni (all blokes, note) – is mostly a collection of all the things people can innocently do – genuinely innocently in the case of the baby – to get on Meredith’s nerves, which eventually summons not only the fetch of her older, ideal-age loving child (not always a nice character – he suggests murdering relatives) but also a witch-like shadowy doppelganger who pulls the film out of indie chamber drama into unrelenting scare story.
It might be a little too on the nose, and I still have a kind of suspicion of the subtext-before-the-horse stratagem of‘it’s not a horror film, it’s really about an important social/mental issue’ which isn’t entirely dispelled here – but Hampshire is rivetting and it’s a successfully upsetting picture.
Discussion
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