Mothers and Monsters
2023 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Edith Jorisch
Genres: drama, satire, surrealism
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, surreal
At a perfect banquet, host-mothers present their babies — delivered to them in heads of cabbage — as the picture-perfect ideal of family life curdles into something far stranger. A surrealist satire on modern maternity under late capitalism.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that takes the visual language of domestic perfection and lets it *rot* in real time, turning cabbage-babies into the most genuinely unsettling metaphor for late-capitalist motherhood I've seen in years. Jorisch understands that the best subversion isn't clever; it's committed, and she commits to the grotesque without winking.
Jorisch's command of surrealist satire sits productively in dialogue with work like Švankmajer's staged grotesque, though the film's reliance on shock value occasionally overwhelms the formal precision needed to sustain its conceptual argument across 16 minutes.
The decision to play the escalation completely straight—letting the horror accumulate through performance and staging rather than editing or music—is what transforms this from a one-liner premise into something genuinely unsettling; it's a film that trusts its own image.
Reviews
Mothers and Monsters makes its point with unforgettable imagery and a style that's impossible to look away from.
The metaphor is blunt, but effective: behind the polished, picture-perfect version of motherhood often showcased online can lie a far more chaotic and messier reality.
Festivals
- Toronto International Film Festival 2023
- Festival du nouveau cinéma 2023, Audience Award
- TIFF Canada's Top Ten 2023
- Canadian Screen Awards 2024
- Prix Iris (Quebec Cinema Awards) 2024