Oh mother! / O matko!
2017 · 12m · Poland
Directed by Paulina Ziółkowska
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, theatrical
An overprotective mother and her son constantly swap ages, sizes and family roles, until the boy decides to escape from under her skirt and start an independent life.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A mother-son body-swap that actually *means* something—the surreal premise isn't window dressing, it's a scalpel for cutting through the pathology of control masquerading as love. Most scouts would pass on the theatrical excess; that's exactly why this lands.
Ziółkowska's command of visual metaphor—the costume shifts, the spatial choreography of dependence—situates this squarely in the lineage of Eastern European body-horror cinema, with the formal rigor to make the grotesque feel inevitable rather than gimmicky.
The decision to literalize the psychological entanglement through physical transformation is elegant, but it's the moment the boy actually *leaves*—the cut that doesn't linger, the refusal to sentimentalize his escape—that elevates what could have been cute into something genuinely unsettling on a shoestring.