THE STORY – Forty-year-old Julia, a successful conductor, and her partner Georg are longing for a child when Dr. Vilfort, a fertility specialist with a private clinic, offers them hope with an experimental procedure. Julia becomes pregnant after successful treatment at the clinic. However, the birth does not go as planned, and the baby is immediately taken away for additional treatment, leaving Julia and her husband in the dark about what has happened. When Julia is finally reunited with the child, she feels strangely distant. The baby’s presence puts a strain on their marriage as it becomes clear that Julia has doubts about whether the baby they have brought home is really hers.
THE CAST – Marie Leuenberger, Hans Löw, Claes Bang & Julia Franz
THE TEAM – Johanna Moder (Director/Writer) & Arne Kohlweyer (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 107 Minutes
They say that the maternal instinct a woman has after giving birth is akin to having superpowers. Their senses get sharper, and their intuition crackles with sensitivity. The phrase ‘Mother’s baby, father’s maybe’ – which implies that this instinct is intrinsic for mothers, in comparison to fathers – ripples throughout Johanna Moder’s Austrian thriller “Mother’s Baby.”
When symphony conductor Julia (Marie Leuenberger) struggles to conceive a baby with her husband Georg (Hans Löw), they go to a specialist named Dr Vilfort (Clae Bangs) whose clinic, Lumen Vitae, promises them a baby. After successfully conceiving, the couple is ecstatic and makes plans for their future, including naming the baby. However, upon the tricky birth – in which a nurse comments on the baby’s full head of hair – her baby is removed from the room so swiftly that alarm bells begin ringing for Julia about the condition of her child. We are soon told by Dr Vilfort and his band of nurses that the child has been moved to a neonatal clinic after being deprived of oxygen for too long.
There’s an immediate sense of unease within “Mother’s Baby” disguised as silly plotting. When Julia’s cervix is fully dilated, she is given an epidural injection for the pain, which is not just poor medical practice but dangerous for both mother and baby. This discomfort continues when Julia and Georg are presented with a healthy baby less than 24 hours later. It’s at this point where the central thesis of Moder’s maternal psychological chiller emerges because nobody believes Julia when she posits the insane notion that this child cannot be the baby she gestated for nine months and pushed out through screams of pain. Her son has too little hair on his head, and he’s smaller than the measurements she was given throughout her pregnancy.
But Georg is a doting father, and Julia has emerged alive and healthy. It is a perfectly placid, docile creature, and everything one could ask for from a newborn as it sleeps through the night and doesn’t wake up to the crashing of Julia’s cymbals. But Julia can’t shake the nagging feeling this is not her child. As the plot of “Mother’s Baby” unravels, we watch her be endlessly and gruelingly gaslit. Moder’s film is slow, methodical, and with no real urgency, telling us exactly what we already know from the evidence provided to us. Nobody believes Julia as she destabilizes, refuses to name the child, and begins harming the baby to make it cry. Sure, nobody believes her, but her actions are so clearly that of postpartum depression that the film places the audience in a state of conflict. “Mother’s Baby” is about believing women, which is in direct contrast with what Julia does within the narrative itself. Women are not believed when they’re being rational, so providing an irrational protagonist can only serve to waver this idea.
The central mystery of whether the child is indeed her’s is significantly lacking in tension. Julia’s leisurely search for evidence is just spinning narrative wheels and bogs the film down in obvious narrative choices. It is also not supported by the strange sense of unease provided through Clae Bangs’ performance as Dr Vilfort, which is immediately apparent upon his arrival on screen. There’s a sneer underneath that undercuts a lot of mystery within the picture, especially as he is shown nurturing axolotls, a cannibalistic salamander-type creature. It is too obvious that Julia is correct about Vilfort because Bangs’ performance gives us no reason to believe he could just be a regular doctor. It’s that Julia and Georg are so desperate to get pregnant that they allow Vilfort to intrude on their attempts to get pregnant.
While Bangs’ performance is too machiavellian to nurture the ideas at play within “Mother’s Baby,” Leuenberger’s is pitched at a thrilling wavelength. Even when neglecting the child – temporarily named Adrian to satisfy Georg’s desires – she never becomes the tornado that is bubbling underneath her performance. Moder, taking the scenic route, is discussing the performativity of motherhood that women must undergo to be accepted by patriarchally inclined society, as Julia, while being threatened with the removal of her child, attempts to keep her emotions contained. That is until a crescendo of a finale – which comes far too late within Kohlweyer’s script to really sell what is attempted – where Moder finally lets the film be horrifying, a late image of Julia in front of her house, the film’s first and only genuinely terrifying shot.
It is a shame to see the film undercut by ambiguity, as the ending then very much feels like a cop-out. After the 107-minute runtime comes to a close, you discover too little about the various ongoings in this narrative as the script writes itself into a corner and has nowhere to go except to perform some cheap thrills. There appears to be too much focus on letting the audience assume the wild theories rather than providing an exposition of any variety, leading to a film that ultimately feels very unsatisfying rather than one whose secrets stay with you after the credits.
