Bone Mother
2018 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Dale Hayward, Sylvie Trouvé
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, horror
A vain youth enters Baba Yaga's living house of bones and emerges transformed into a thing of terror.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to genuflect to the Slavic folklore aesthetic, but what actually kills here is how casually it inverts the vanity-punished fable—the transformation isn't redemption, it's promotion to monstrosity, and the house of bones becomes a weird coming-of-age metaphor nobody asked for.
Hayward and Trouvé are in direct conversation with a centuries-old tradition of cautionary folklore, but they've earned their surrealism through meticulous production design and tonal control—this is formal mastery in service of myth-making, the kind of short that clarifies why we still need dark fantasy.
The decision to let the transformation happen almost offscreen—to dwell on the protagonist's face and posture instead of the spectacle—is what separates this from a showier student film; it's restraint that makes the final emergence infinitely more unsettling than any practical effect could.