The best horror movies are those that connect with our most primal fears. Those that unite what scares us on the screen with what really scares us in real life. The ones that make you jump out of your seat without effects or rushes of music. Many have renamed those genre films that talk about social and/or political issues as ‘high horror’, but they forget that horror classics have always united the fears of the time in which they were made, such as the fear of nuclear weapons. in night of the living dead (1968).
The arrival of female directors to cinema and the genre has made other topics enter the equation. Without a doubt motherhood is one of them. There it is babadook, by Jennifer Kent, as a great and recent example. But terror does not have to be based on paranormal apparitions or serial killers, there are terrors that are found in everyday life, in everyday life, in hard routine.
That is what Mar Coll achieves with his long-awaited return to cinema after many years (too many) without directing a feature film. Latest, We all want the best for her He also performed at Seminci 13 years ago. The same festival where he has screened Hail Mary, her excellent film that turns real, unfiltered motherhood into a horror film that is much scarier than any of those that are released every week in movie theaters.
Mar Coll tells the daily life of a writer who has been a mother and who does not develop any bond of affection like the one she sees in the other mothers in the park or the classes she attends to be a modern and attached mother. She has a young husband who loves her and cares about the child, but who is not considering taking leave to help her with her upbringing or for her to write again.
An event, the news of a mother who has drowned her two babies in a bathtub, will cause everything to turn upside down, causing her imagination to travel to places where she does not want it to go. Would she be able to do it? Would she be better off without her? baby? These are the uncomfortable and brave questions that Mar Coll asks in a film with an opera structure – separated into acts and with the wonderful music of Zeltia Montes increasing that feeling of inevitable tragedy -, which simply shows the daily life of many mothers who are not They are listened to because their speech is annoying. If they do, they are marked as bad mothers.
How many women do we know who are able to verbally express their doubts about the decision they have made? How can anyone complain about what has always been sold as ‘the best decision of life’? Hail Maryas you see, throws uncomfortable darts in the viewer’s face. It doesn’t offer solutions, but it features a protagonist who tries to survive despite everything. Despite being unfriendly or borderline.
Although it cannot be said that the film is a canonical work of horror, what happens on the screen scares and awes, and even in the dreamlike fugues that the director proposes – as always writing the script with Valentina Viso – she flirts directly. even with him body horror, the one that is so fashionable thanks to titles like The substance. Because the woman’s body is always one of the most forgotten when it comes to motherhood. They are mutant bodies, whose breasts change and hurt. Whose stomachs have even been cut in half to be able to get the baby out. There is in Hail Mary a determined commitment to show it without restrictions.
At the forefront of all this is a hypnotic presence, that of Laura Weissmahr, an actress almost unknown in cinema although known for the play Falsestuffby Nao Albet and Marcel Borras and which gives one of the performances of the year. One that should end in the form of Goya. Weissmahr is a body that crawls in pain. An interpretation from which one cannot take one’s eyes away and that nails every doubt, every edge. She is as unfriendly as she is tender. So real it’s scary. At his side, an Oriol Pla always in his place like the ally husband who doesn’t know anything. Without a doubt we are faced with one of the best Spanish films of the year.
regretful mothers
Although 11 years have passed since We all want the best for her, Mar Coll does not feel that she has been completely stopped. In between, a series as authorial as Kill the father and the direction of a friends project like This is not Sweden -recent winner of the Ondas for Best Comedy Series-. But she also recognizes that in between came motherhood and the pandemic. It’s not that having a child inspired this film, but when she got together with her screenwriter, with whom she has been friends since she was ten, they both realized that “when you are a mother, you practically only talk about this.”
The puerperium is a very fragile moment and it had all the elements that could be applied in a genre film. Terror is a very fertile ground on a creative level
Mar Coll
— Filmmaker
“It was very difficult for it not to be a movie about mothers because that was the theme. “I had a one-year-old baby, and at that moment, when we sat down to decide what movie we were going to do, I only talked about babies when you have a one-year-old baby,” she remembers. Of course, it had to bear the hallmarks of both, and that means “thinking about things from the point of view of questioning.” “We find that more stimulating than embracing a more conservative or more traditional, more majoritarian discourse. We always look for the crack and work from there. The novel –Mothers don’t by Katixa Agirre – already had a dissonant discourse about motherhood and we wanted the film to be that way, and in that sense it can seem more scandalous, provocative or be more indigestible, because we have taken the most difficult point,” he adds.
That point is that of a mother who cannot verbalize what she would like and it is something as simple and complicated at the same time as saying ‘I regret it’. “Years ago I heard about it, and I read a book that I don’t remember the title that gave testimonies from mothers, some even anonymously, who regretted being mothers. This generated rejection for me. I wasn’t a mother yet, probably because of this, because before being a mother you are a child and you have the idea that your mother was born to take care of you,” she points out.
She believes that when this happens, one always thinks of a mother who is sick, mentally unstable, or in a precarious situation, as if something had to happen to repent, “but it doesn’t.” “In the classes before the birth, they taught us a lot about the fact that the connection was not immediate, or that there could be feelings of rejection, that there was postpartum depression… many things that remain very intimate and very little explored because they are not in our framework mental as a society”, he emphasizes.
An uncomfortable terror
To generate that discomfort “the idea was to make a horror movie.” “That’s what we liked about Katixa’s novel, that this premise was taken more towards a thriller. We loved the idea of playing with language and making a different movie for us too, something that is stimulating. We thought that this first part of motherhood, which is the postpartum period, is a very fragile moment that matched perfectly with gender. It had all the elements: the body, fear, suffocation… and that could be applied in a film. “Horror is a very fertile ground on a creative level.”
What he was clear about was that he wanted an “expressive” film, because the theme is very forceful. A film “that was not cold, lukewarm, discursive or intellectual.” “Enough articles and enough books have been written about motherhood to make a speech or thesis film. We wanted a vibrant and fast-paced experience that would take you by the hand and not let go until the end. That you were close to that anguish. That you were not in an analytical position, but totally attached to the protagonist.”
This is where the body and its importance in a pregnancy also come in: “We were aware that part of the elements of motherhood play with terror and have to do with the body or fluids. A birth and pregnancy is a Martian thing. There is a very brutal transformation in a short time. It is something, in a certain way, aggressive. Breastfeeding, fluids, diapers, skin. You are always naked, always with your chest out. And in that sense that has an impact.”
#Hail #Mary #real #motherhood #filters #brilliant #horror #film
