Cradle Song
2019 · 13m · USA
Directed by Celeste Chaney
A new mother in the grip of postpartum psychosis becomes convinced her dead father is haunting her infant son, forcing her to confront a generational legacy of mental illness.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Postpartum psychosis as haunted-house thriller sounds conventional on paper, but Chaney's refusal to let the audience escape into doubt—committing fully to the mother's fractured reality rather than playing it as ambiguous—actually dismantles the genre from the inside.
Chaney situates herself within a lineage of intimate psychological cinema and the essay-film tradition, where lived experience and formal experimentation converge; the result is rigorously unsentimental about a subject that invites easy pathos.
The decision to shoot entirely from the mother's perceptual field—never cutting away to verify or debunk her visions—is the hinge the whole film turns on, and it's what makes a 13-minute film about mental illness feel genuinely disorienting rather than merely depicting disorientation.
Festivals
- World London Film Festival 2019, Gold Winner