Review: Mother’s Baby
- BERLINALE 2025: Johanna Moder rustles up an eerie thriller about a mother unable to connect with her newborn, but is not brave enough to push it to the limit
"Mother's baby, father's maybe." It’s an old saying that gynaecologist Dr Vilfort (Claes Bang) has to offer when Julia (Marie Leuenberger) comes to see him. But in her case, the situation is reversed. While her husband Georg (Hans Löw) has happily accepted the newborn into the family, she is struggling to accept her unnamed son as her own. Is he really hers? Was he switched? Is he maybe the scary product of human experiments that Dr Vilfort’s clinic has pushed on her?
It is with this premise that begins Johanna Moder’s film Mother's Baby [+see also:
trailer
interview: Johanna Moder
film profile], which has just premiered in Competition at the 75th Berlinale. At first, it seems like Moder is building a strong psychological thriller based on the complicated emotions of motherhood and postpartum. When we meet Julia and Georg, they are a couple unable to conceive, which is why they turn to the small, secluded clinic of Dr Vilfort. The formal wood and glass palace overlooking the Vienna Basin atop a hill immediately evokes a haunted house, but Moder does not push for the extremes. For now, she wants to stay grounded in the reality of the horror, the pain, and the anxiety.
For soon enough, Julia is pregnant, ready to put her busy career as an orchestra conductor on hold and become the mum she always wanted to be. But as she goes into labour, things start going wrong. The baby is not coming, and the umbilical chord is wrapped around its neck. With a whole armada of nurses gathered around midwife Gerlinde (Julia Franz Richter), she finally pushes through. But then, the child is immediately taken away by staff due to the complications. Julia and Georg remain alone, clueless, amongst the mess and the emotions of the painful birth. Days later, when she finally gets to see the baby, something does not click for Julia. “He’s so quiet”, she later tells friends. He doesn’t cry, feels no pain, and is never hungry. “Would you rather have a screaming baby?” Georg asks impatiently. But that is not what Julia is struggling with. “You wanted a child”, he says again. “Not this one”, she answers.
What spikes her interest, though, is Dr Vilfort's fascination with the axolotl, a Mexican salamander that has regenerative capabilities and with whom stem cell experiments are seemingly being conducted. Dr Vilfort even sends Julia one such animal as a gift. Is her son, a child she is still unwilling to name, the result of an experiment? Is his perfect baby behaviour, his being unharmed from birth due to his being built in a test tube and not in her uterus?
This is a promising concept, but Moder tiptoes around the idea too timidly. Her efforts to critique a society which wants women to function perfectly after birth can be lauded, yet her attempt at also calling out the fact that mothers get the lion’s share of baby care while giving up their career comes up a bit short. Julia's downward spiral, her emerging hallucinations, and the gruesome discovery she makes in the clinic do not add up as neatly as one would hope. In the end, Moder offers great ideas but is a little afraid to dive fully into their potential.
Mother’s Baby was produced by Austrian outfit Freibeuter Film, Swiss company Tellfilm, and German outfit The Match Factory Productions. It is sold internationally by The Match Factory.
Photogallery 19/02/2025: Berlinale 2025 - Mother's Baby
16 pictures available. Swipe left or right to see them all.
© 2024 Dario Caruso for Cineuropa - dario-caruso.fr, @studio.photo.dar, Dario Caruso
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