Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby: Moder Repeats Motherhood Horrors
A palpable, instinctual fascination with the potential horrors of pregnancy are exactly why neonatal dread remains such a fascinating cinematic subgenre. Alas, there are several iconic titles which often seem to eclipse contemporary offerings attempting to examine the inherent tensions associated with pregnancy and childbirth. Johanna Moder’s latest film, Mother’s Baby, is the latest in what seems a perennial cycle revisiting these fears through more outlandish parameters. But hasn’t this been done to death? A suitably paranoia primed lead performance from Marie Leuenberger (and an appropriately sinister Claes Bang) can’t get around the script’s familiar beats, which also feed us details making everything seem too obvious for any real tension to build.
Linda (Leuenberger), a noted conductor, has been longing to have a child with her husband Georg (Hans Löw). But having recently turned forty, the window of opportunity seems to be dwindling. Luckily, they’ve booked a consultation with the esteemed Dr. Vilfort (Claes Bang), who confirms he can get the couple pregnant with one try. He lives up to his word, and a smooth pregnancy is brought to term. However, when Julia delivers her baby, it’s whisked away and she’s not allowed to meet her child for hours due to ‘complications.’ When the baby is finally brought to her bedside, the child is much smaller and has less hair than what she delivered. And yet, try as she might, she can’t seem to convince anyone else of her worst fears. As her behavior deteriorates, Linda at last stumbles upon the dirty secret of the fertility clinic.
Upon meeting the uncomfortably serene Dr. Vilfort, whose office pet axolotls are intensely introduced by Diego Ramos Rodiguez’s score, it’s immediately clear Moder is going for a hybrid of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and some variation on The Island of Doctor Moreau. So it’s no surprise when complications ensue during the child’s delivery, a wrapped umbilical cord cutting off oxygen. What’s most inexplicable, more so than the obvious horrors going on behind the scenes, is the behavior of Julia and Georg (who, like every husband in these scenarios, moves from being incredibly useless to an appendage of the enemy). When Julia finally meets her infant, she knows something is wrong, while the audience knows the baby in her arms is definitively a changeling. A tedious unraveling of this mystery ensues and Mother’s Baby feels mostly like the Austrian version of False Positive (2021), where Ilana Glazer and Pierce Brosnan play a mother and doctor doing the same dance.
It would appear Vilfort’s clinic is a hub for creature babies, but perhaps it would have been more intriguing to hint at what their ambiguous aims are. The products are children who don’t seem to cause much fuss and maybe aren’t prone to pain or hunger, which makes some other subversion of this story more interesting (as in maybe some parents would prefer raising a humanoid child who doesn’t keep them awake all night). As the title suggests, there is a differentiation between what could constitute ‘mother’s baby’ and ‘father’s baby,’ but this doesn’t really register as strongly as it should. Instead, the standard house of experimental horrors in the nether regions of the clinic confirms the obvious, leading to a finale which feels conveniently inconclusive. The clinic has the good sense to delete patient’s files from their digital database but the protocol for disposing of corpses is, at best, questionable. As we return to a shot of Julia ferociously conducting her orchestra, Moder actually leaves us with one formidable question to ponder. What would Lydia Tar do?
Reviewed on February 18th at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival (75th edition) – Main Competition. 107 mins.
★★/☆☆☆☆☆
