The Mental Load for Dummies
2018 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Jessy Poulin
Genres: comedy, documentary
Tones: contemplative, humorous
Four overworked women from Abitibi reflect on balancing work and family and the dangers of exhaustion.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a doc about women's exhaustion to be solemn or soapy, so watching four Abitibi women crack wise about the mental load while the whole thing stays funny *and* gutting is genuinely disorienting—which means it's doing something right.
A compact documentary that locates itself squarely in the social-realist tradition of Québécois intimate portraiture, using humor as formal counterweight to its subject rather than escape from it; the tonal restraint is exemplary.
The decision to let the women themselves set the comedic rhythm—when to lean into the joke, when to fracture it with a hard truth—transforms what could've been a PSA into something alive; that tonal autonomy is what makes two minutes feel substantial.