Yummy Mummy
2022 · 15m · United Kingdom
Directed by Gabriela Staniszewska
Genres: drama, experimental, horror
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
Ignored throughout her pregnancy, Lilith feels her identity being smothered by her burgeoning motherhood; her anxieties begin to manifest physically and she starts to fall apart — literally.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Body horror as maternal anxiety is the obvious move here, but Staniszewska commits to the literalism so hard—the physical dissolution matching psychological collapse—that it circles back around to genuinely unsettling rather than gimmicky; most directors would wink at the metaphor, she just lets it happen.
A precise distillation of the uncanny-body tradition running from Cronenberg through folk-horror revival, yet Staniszewska positions herself distinctly in the lineage of feminist surrealists interrogating motherhood's erasure—the formal control of the deterioration becomes the film's argument.
The crucial move is the sound design and editing rhythm that makes Lilith's physical fragmentation feel inevitable rather than effects-driven—a single decision about how to cut between her internal experience and external perception transforms what could be shock value into something that actually lands as horror.