26/11/2025 - Screenwriter Mara Fondacaro’s directorial debut is a somewhat raw horror film about motherhood which speaks to local Italian gothic cinema

We could count the number of horror films directed by European women on one hand, and if it hadn’t been for Julia Ducournau, the genre would have remained a male preserve and wouldn’t be used today to tackle issues relating to the body and the female condition. In this sense, the curiosity surrounding 30-year-old Neapolitan screenwriter Mara Fondacaro’s directorial debut, The First Child - unveiled in the Pesaro Film Festival before scooping the SIAE Best Screenplay Prize in the 18th edition of Rome Film Fest, and now hitting Italian cinemas on 27 November via Lo Scrittoio - is wholly understandable.

The First Child stays within the more traditional lines of psychological horror, albeit with the same female gaze which made Jennifer Kent’s Australian Babadook a cult hit, for example, and which delves into the dynamics of maternal guilt triggered by the demand for perfection which is inherent to a patriarchal society. It’s a psychological horror with a touch of philosophy, so much so that it begins with a university lecture in which protagonist Ada (Benedetta Cimatti) is talking to students about Kierkegaard’s notion of anxiety, “the feeling that arises when we’re faced with an infinite number of possibilities opening up before us”, and the fear of making the wrong decision and wishing we’d chosen otherwise. And, ultimately, this is the idea underpinning the script penned by the author.

Ada is married to Rino (Simone Liberati), a colleague who teaches literature, and she’s pregnant. A few days before the birth, the couple decide to return to the old stone farmhouse by the lake where – we soon learn - their little boy Andrea (Lorenzo Ferrante) accidentally drowned a few years earlier. They’re pretending they’re fine, but both are still deeply affected by the tragedy. Things take an unsettling turn one stormy night when Ada finds the toy train Andrea happened to be playing with at the time of his death, and the next day she thinks she sees him, the skin on his face macerated by water.

Without her husband’s knowledge, Ada meets her friend Paola (Astrid Meloni), a medium devoted to spiritualism whose job is to guide tourists around sites consecrated to a pagan deity called Mefite, who has links to water, who people call upon to help with female fertility, and who, in Roman times, was seen as a malevolent being who guarded an entrance to the Underworld in her lake.

The two women organise a séance to summon the dead child, with Paola warning Ada never to ask a spirit to return to the world of the living. But Ada pays her no heed. The boy maliciously reveals his objective: to prevent his brother being born. The film incorporates a few jump scares into the story, in order to remain within the conventions of the genre, amplified by Alessandro Ciani’s score, while Fabio Paulucci’s cold, ashen cinematography renders aquatic blue tones evoking the depths of the lake which, together with the house, maps out the film’s unsettling boundaries.

Channelled through the horror form, The First Child addresses grief, the difficulty of striking the right balance between our role as a parent and maintaining our relationship as a couple, and a model of motherhood which demands constant presence and dedication. Rather than indebting itself to high and distant offerings (both geographically and temporally speaking), such as the classic Rosemary’s Baby, the film’s horror favours a gothic approach which looks to the paranormal folklore and superstitions found in the Italian provinces, primarily represented by Pupi Avati’s cinema. The First Child is a fairly raw debut which is clearly a warm-up for this promising filmmaker who’s already at work on new projects.

The First Child was produced by Nightswin and Sajama Film, with the support of the Molise Region and the Italian Ministry of Culture.

(Translated from Italian)