THE STORY – Under traumatic circumstances, Gül gives birth to her first child: an inhuman creature. What’s a single mother to do? Protect her newborn, albeit alien-like, offspring by any means necessary, of course.
THE CAST – Hazar Ergüçlü & Guven Kirac
THE TEAM – Alphan Eşeli (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 99 Minutes
There is a sequence midway through “Mutter: The Diary of a Mother” in which Gül (Hazar Ergüçlü), alone in her deteriorating house with barely any money for herself and her newborn child, goes to put on makeup just to feel like a person again. But she finds that she has none. So, she uses her own blood as lipstick and blush. It’s an image that emphasizes exactly what writer-director Alphan Eseli masterfully depicts: horror as the most precise language for a female experience that defies softer description.
We first meet the titular mother, Gül, in what feels like an action sequence. On a dark, misty road along Turkey’s Black Sea coast, she is in the backseat of a speeding van, heavily pregnant and in labor. The film’s sound design is immaculate from the first frame – a rich, atmospheric score builds beneath the imagery of fog-shrouded forests, and yet when the van appears in the distance, you can hear the wet road beneath its tires. Then comes the horror: the baby inside Gül is pushing against her stomach in every direction at once, and the sound design makes clear that the baby in there is anything but normal. The tearing sounds of the insides culminate in a splatter of blood, spurting all over the interior windows. Gül’s screams of pain stop. She and her partner look down in terror at what has emerged from her. Her husband Cem runs off, leaving Gül alone to raise a grotesque, mutant child. Designed by Matt Hatton, whose creature work includes “Alien: Covenant” and “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the creature is at once fragile and terrifying, catching Gül in a dichotomy that lingers throughout the film: love and ruin.
What follows is probably the ultimate single-mother survival movie. Ergüçlü plays Gül with extraordinary restraint and emotion, carrying long, dialogue-free stretches on expression alone, as she portrays a character who tries to raise her child in secret, under the roof of a falling-apart house, an hour from the nearest town, without money or support. Her breasts don’t hold milk to feed her child. They hold blood. When she feeds it, the score and Gül’s face shift to something that can only be described as a mother’s love, even as the thing tears her breast to threads. This child, no matter what it is, came from her. It is hers, and unlike her husband, she can’t just run from it.
Eseli is unsparing in the depiction of a single mother alone in the world. The desperation about basically anything, even just about how to survive. The total absence of support. The paranoia that comes from keeping a secret the world wouldn’t accept. A visit to the butcher ends with Gül holding a knife to his throat. It’s a window into just how thoroughly the traumatic birth has remade her. In a following scene, she stands on a bridge, looking down at the traffic below, tears on her face, wanting to end it. But she can’t because of her child. It’s a solemn, hopeless film for long stretches, and it earns every bit of that weight.
The film is also honest in its politics. Set in rural Turkey, “Mutter” depicts an environment in which a woman’s survival feels entirely contingent on men, and when that man is gone, there is nothing. Gül ends up selling herself to her ex-husband’s boss, a man who comes sniffing around her house trying to find Cem. She takes his money. He offers to help her find a job, and the score sours at the suggestion that he wants to keep her close for his own satisfaction. But what else can she do in her circumstance?
If the film has a limitation, and this is perhaps horror tastes speaking, it’s that we don’t see the creature quite enough. For a film whose central horror is giving birth to and raising something monstrous, it’s kept in the shadows a lot of the time. It’s a choice that reads as restraint but occasionally feels withholding. But when we do get a sustained look, in the film’s final sequence, it lands with effective devastation.
Ergüçlü anchors all of it. The dark, mist-shrouded cinematography gives her a fitting canvas, and the loud, atmospheric, precise score does wonders for the film’s mood. “Mutter: The Diary of a Mother” is a maternal horror movie in the lineage of films like the exceptional “Huesera the Bone Woman,” hitting with blunt force on the hardest parts of motherhood, emphasized under a genre lens. Motherhood is a bloody hard thing to do on your own, and the film doesn’t shy away from showing you just how hard it is.
