Mother's Baby

“Mother’s baby, father’s – maybe”, a proverb says and is usually right. Usually, not always, because in Johanna Moder’s horror-thriller Mother’s Baby, we are going to be faced with the possibility that the expected tautology might not be exactly true. It might be easy to dismiss the movie as yet another riff on the horrors of motherhood, but we should not do it just like that.

Firstly, the horrors of parenthood and especially motherhood are as real as they can be, and anyone who has just witnessed, let alone lived through them, could confirm the claim. Secondly, Moder manages to keep her audience engaged and guessing, as she toys with different ideas in slick packaging.

Acclaimed conductor Julia (Marie Leuenberger) and her husband Georg (Hans Löw) need a baby to make their almost flawless life turn into total perfection. They cannot conceive naturally, so they go to a fancy unorthodox clinic lead by Dr Vilfort (Claes Bang), who assures them that they are the perfect candidates and that, with his help and guidance, they will become parents. Julia’s pregnancy goes perfectly well, but giving birth turns out to be complicated. Due to the lack of oxygen caused by the umbilical cord around the baby's neck, he gets rushed into a medical intervention at the nearby clinic, but only days later he comes back to the mother appearing as healthy as babies might be.

The thing is, the baby boy appears too perfect – makes no fuss at all, has few needs and even has a high threshold for discomfort and pain of any kind – so Julia suspects something is wrong. She even refuses to name him. And the regular house calls and visits by the midwife at the clinic, Gerlinde (Julia Franz Richter), raise even more of her concern. Is it down to Julia’s postpartum depression, which many women experience? Is it the matter of her not being in control for the first time in her life – she is a conductor after all? Is she just plain paranoid, so she imagines a threat and distorts the bits and pieces of information she gets to fit her version of truth? Or is she right that something sinister happened and will keep happening if she does not act?

What serves best for the film is its sleek production design that highlights the coldness of modern living and work spaces, from the couple’s fancy loft that overlooks the Vienna city centre, via the clinic on a hill just above the city, to the busy, neon-lit public hospital where Julia conducts a piece of her “investigation”. That coldness is sometimes interrupted by striking details that are not only decorative, but also have their purpose in the film’s dramaturgy. The notion that the only music we hear in the film is either ambient or a prerequisite of the script also helps in building up the tension.

The casting is also a high point of the film, as Marie Leuenberger (seen in films like Caged Birds and The Divine Order) is more than proficient in playing the game of is-she/is-she-not-crazy? especially when “confronted” by the Danish powerhouse Claes Bang (whose German is appropriately accent-free) and his dominant energy. Hans Löw (of I’m Your Man fame) might be wasted on a clichéd role of an unsupportive husband, but the coldly beautiful presence of Julia Franz Richter helps a lot by bringing sinister vibes.

Basically, all Moder has to do in executing the script, co-written with Arne Kohlweyer, is to point our attention to different details and keep us guessing whose version of reality is the true one. It is a game as old as genre cinema, and the filmmaker who previously made her name with romantic comedy-dramas, proves to be a bonafide genre auteur, although it is her first attempt. Yes, Mother’s Baby hits many of the common ideas from genre classics like Rosemary’s Baby and the Covid-era streaming hit False Positive – the resemblance of the both film’s plots might raise some originality suspicions – but it does so in an elegant and entertaining way. That way, the movie strikes the point of genre filmmaking – it has to appear fresh, despite not being all that new and original.

Reviewed on: 01 Apr 2026