Mother’s Baby: eerie study of maternal anxiety never fully commits to genre movie weirdness
Austrian writer-director Johanna Moder’s unsettling story of a new mother who suspects that her baby may not be hers builds effective tension but stops short of full-blown horror.
- Reviewed from the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival
Horror-inflected takes on maternal ambivalence are having something of a moment right now, from Marielle Heller’s snarling Nightbitch (2024) to Mary Bronstein’s visceral If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. While lower key than either of those full-throated titles, Johanna Moder’s Mother’s Baby shares their vision of motherhood as a claustrophobic, dysmorphic experience, the sense of a world forever changed, perhaps not for the better.
If Heller and Bronstein both use pungent physical metaphors to depict their protagonists’ scars – a woman turning into a dog, a gaping hole in a ceiling – Moder’s focus is largely internal, on the psychic damage wrought when a woman’s experience of motherhood fails to match expectation. The film opens with a straightforward image of embodied symbolism, a man and a woman riding a fairground ride, shrieking with glee and terror, as they are thrown into the air. They are Julia (Marie Leuenberger) and Georg (Hans Löw), a happy middle-aged couple who appear to live a life of peaceful tranquillity, sharing a gorgeous beige-hued Vienna penthouse and relishing Julia’s hard-won professional success as an orchestral conductor.
The only thing missing from this contented picture is a child, so the couple enlist the help of the charismatic Dr Vilfort (Claes Bang). Vilfort boasts a picturesque private clinic in the mountains, an extraordinary success rate and a reassuring catchphrase (“alles in Ordnung” – “everything is OK”), and soon Julia is pregnant. But despite Vilfort’s close attention, the birth is traumatic and Julia is not able to see her son for hours after delivery, a separation which sows a seed of unease. Back home, Julia reckons with challenges often faced by a new mother on maternity leave – exhaustion, loneliness, a loss of professional identity – but alongside these familiar concerns, she also becomes gripped by a growing conviction: that this curiously placid, often silent baby, might not be her child after all.
Mother’s Baby is a B-movie wrapped in cashmere blankets, a realist study of early motherhood and post-partum mental health which eventually encroaches upon the boundaries of sci-fi and horror. The most obvious touchstone here is Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and like that seminal study of maternal paranoia, Moder’s film draws tension from the growing disconnect between Julia’s perception of reality, and that of those around her.
Leuenberger is highly plausible as a woman unable to ignore her instincts despite social censure, while Bang’s unctuous doctor and Julia Franz Richter’s over-attentive midwife deliver unsettlingly ambiguous support. It’s a shame though that despite a promising build-up, Moder never fully commits to the midnight madness possibilities offered by the genre movies she references, shying away when the chance to go full-blown creep-fest finally arrives. A sinister recurring image of an axolotl, sitting placidly in its tank (until it’s very much not), gestures towards a transcendent weirdness that Mother’s Baby, unfortunately, never quite reaches.