Fantasy

dir: Marielle Heller

2025

In this ongoing series / festival of recent movies in the “maternal rage” sub-genre, which has seen something of a renaissance recently, there is this flick. These are important flicks with women in key roles, not only as the main character but as the writers / directors themselves, and I’m not even sure that they’re here because of awards-bait reasons (although that has to be a factor, because none of them were box office gold). I am interested in them because they carry very different messages about how women deal with the underlying disappointments that come with getting the brass ring we are constantly told they should want and need (it’s a biological imperative, don’t you know).

These ‘big three’ flicks I’m alluding to are If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Nightbitch and Die, My Love. There is no doubt Jennifer Lawrence is going to nominated; I hope and am pretty sure Rose Byrne will get a guernsey for If I Had Legs. I don’t think anyone was going to die on a hill over Amy, poor Amy getting any shiny ornaments for her mantelpiece for this flick.

First of all, the title. That’s a hard sell especially to the demographic you’re aiming at.

All these films are explicitly about the same thing; the regret that comes with becoming a mum, the resentment towards others who are not recent mothers; the resentment towards others who are recent mothers who seem to be doing it easier or have more support; doing everything for the household, the baby and themselves even if they’re not ‘single mothers’, it just feels that way; losing one’s sense of self; seeing the death of the illusions one had about themselves and their self-worth that isn’t connected to becoming a mother, and so on.

When I say these ideas are universally relatable, I mean many if not most mums might be able to relate through their own experiences, other lumps like me might acknowledge their righteous and justified rage, but not relate to it personally, but at least recognise how the “system” benefits me and jerks like me to the detriment of mothers everywhere.

When people talk about who does what in the home, within a family, within a couple with a new kid, the distribution of labour we know still falls along gendered lines. So almost nothing has changed on that front even if some guy somewhere emptied the dishwasher properly for once or brings the washing in from the line and dumps it all on the floor thinking the job is done: women / mothers are still “expected” to do everything regardless of whether they work or not and regardless of whether it’s crushing their souls or not.

Men are still like “but I worked all week, I need some time to relax?” or “but I spent all afternoon doing the lawns and building something out of stone and wood in the backyard, you can’t expect me to vacuum, make dinner, feed the baby and the dog, and give the kid their bath just because it needs doing”, and all is right in the world.

For us, for the guys. For the women who feel compelled to turn into wild animals in order to escape, well, I guess the story is different from their perspective.

This is a confused, confusing, all too pat, yet superficially ‘empowering’ version of this kind of story. It is less a desperate cry to be seen and heard, less a primal scream and more a personal story squeezed through an Oprah-like lens in order to make it more palatable to mass audiences, even mass audiences of women who could possibly relate but maybe shouldn't.

It’s not an easy watch, but not for the reasons you might think. I had actually tried watching this flick way, way earlier in 2025, and gave up because I was cringing so painfully that I couldn’t continue. So only now when I launched into this idea of reviewing these similarly themed movies to see what worked and what didn’t, did I force myself to continue watching it past its first 10 minutes.

dir: Daina Oniunas-Pusiċ

2023

A film about a dying teenager… It’s not a guaranteed barrel of laughs. I guess there’s this weird sub-genre of YA books adapted to movies about dying teenagers finding love (just before the end), but in general you’d think studios worry the subject matter is too confronting to get bums on seats in theatres.

What about… Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus? If I told you she was in it, would that entice you back into the cinema? She has a solid number of post-Seinfeld performances such that you would think a decent person wouldn’t have to mention what she’s most famous for. She’s been great in those Nicole Holofcener movies like Enough Said and You Hurt My Feewings, and there’s her amazing run on Veep.

Her performance is much neater and much more straight-forward here (even as the story becomes more fantastical). She plays the mother of a dying teenager, and she’s pretty much in denial about it despite the constant and unavoidable daily struggle to keep things together. She knows her daughter is dying, but she can’t even talk to her daughter about it, and sort-of avoids her, palming her off onto the nurse who looks after her (Leah Harvey). She has a nurse to look after Tuesday (Lola Pettigrew) during the day, but she spends that time pawning things, hanging out in cafes and sleeping on a bench in a park.

Why? Well, why not?

These are not the characters we first meet in this flick, not really. There’s another character I haven’t mentioned yet who plays the most central role, other than Tuesday. I don’t know if it’s a he, or how they choose to style themselves, but today’s the day you find out that Death Himself or Death Itself is an orange macaw. A parrot. The Parrot of Death (Arinze Mokwe Kene). Born of the void, he has no friends, but he has one task, and that is to visit the dying, wave his mighty wing at them, and then see them ushered out of this world.

He grows large, he grows small as needs be, he is greeted with relief, or hate, or fear, or scorn, but the result is the same.

dir: C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi

2023

I was not sure what this flick was going to be like, or what it was about, knowing nothing about it. But now I’ve watched it, and presumably that means I know something about it and have a relevant, informed opinion.

Well. I’m not sure how much I have to say about a flick set contemporarily, shot in black and white, that’s really about matrilineal matriarchal monarchies. I mean, I guess they’re better than the alternatives, but they’re still not a decent form of government.

I have to say “in general”, because I would be taking the piss if I implied that the point of the film is that we should all be living in matrilineal, matriarchal monarchies.

This film is just saying that, for these people, of the Iyi village, they need to keep being ruled by a matriarch, because of their connection to Mami Wata, who is a benevolent water spirit / deity who looks after them, thanks to their connection through their Intermediary.

Their Intermediary, sort of like a cross between a priestess and a conduit for Mami Wata’s will, is Mama Efe (Rita Edochie).

While the people believe in Mami Wata, and her earthly ambassador, they give of their bounty to her, out of respect, out of fear, to earn favour. Lots of reasons. And she in turn does…

She does stuff. She is regal, her belief is unwavering, and she does all the rituals they all love. She plays the hits, so to speak.

dir: Yorgos Lanthimos

2023

I remember being amazed at the success of Yorgos Lanthimos several years ago when The Favourite became so feted and popular, getting all the awards and plaudits and … does anyone even remember The Favourite now? I mean, sure, it only came out in 2018, but that feels like a hundred years ago now.

I guess what I found so surprising is that all the weird goofiness of how Lanthimos puts his films together wasn’t enough to dissuade audiences or lose Olivia Colman an Oscar for Best Actress.

And if anyone thinks the path of an idiosyncratic director is to become less idiosyncratic as the budgets get bigger and the casts more A-List, well, I don’t think that’s the path he’s on at the moment. If anything…

Poor Things, if it was watched by a lot of people last year, and if it’s watched by more people on streaming etc this year, will be one of the weirdest flicks many people have seen in a good long while. And that’s not just the subject matter or the frequent uses of fish eye anamorphic lenses that make certain scenes look like they were filmed through someone’s front door peephole.

Maybe there’s a bit lifted from Frankenstein, but I don’t think thematically it has as much in common, at all. Man’s hubris in seeking to be like God by creating life is not questioned here; there’s no cautionary aspect. Our creation here, being Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), is not the monster, even if her creation is a ghastly act of unholy Science run amok.

It’s based on a book, by Alisdair Gray, which I have not read, but looking at the list of books he’s written, he seems like an absolute Scottish legend, and I’d be more than curious to read the one this is based on, as well as the others.

I think the only acknowledgement they make of the story’s Scottish origins is the appallingly inconsistent attempt at a Scottish accent that Willem Dafoe assays playing the character of God(win) Baxter, Bella’s creator. It’s like he starts a sentence and then towards the end of it remembers “oh yeah, I’m meant to be doing an accent” and then throws a big of a brogue over the last syllables. It’s so comical that I couldn’t even tell if it was deliberate on the director’s part, or whether he just gave up.