Maria Calado

Films

Mother Monster

A feral new mother who survives childbirth discovers that her body has not finished birthing, forcing her into an animal state as her sense of self is violently expelled.

Mother Monster began with a desire to portray pregnancy and birth beyond their traditionally sanitised and romanticised depictions, as too often seen in film.

We often speak about motherhood as something that completes a woman, and pregnancy and childbirth as inherently beautiful, almost sacred experiences. While they absolutely can be, they can also be violent, frightening, isolating and completely transformative to someone’s relationship with their own body. I became particularly interested in the loss of identity that can accompany that transformation. When a woman becomes a mother, suddenly her identity is simplified and reduced to first and foremost “a mom.” The complicated and multifaceted individual woman who existed before the child becomes secondary.

Photos: Chloe Cooper

With Mother Monster, I wanted to take that fear—the fear of losing ownership of your body, of no longer recognising yourself, of feeling your previous identity slipping away—and make it physical. Body horror became a natural language for exploring experiences that are difficult to articulate, making them visceral and impossible to ignore.

The horror is not motherhood itself, or the child. It is the possibility of becoming completely removed from your own body and sense of self through an experience the world expects you to experience only as beautiful. Ultimately, Mother Monster asks what childbirth can do not only physically, but psychologically—to autonomy, identity, and the person who remains when everyone else begins to see a mother.