Mothers and Monsters is one of those short films that slips from elegance into eeriness without ever raising its voice. Édith Jorisch builds the entire experience around a banquet — ornate, polished, almost ceremonial — where a group of impeccably composed mothers gather with their newborns. Except the babies don’t arrive wrapped in blankets; they emerge from cabbages, as if plucked straight from a garden of expectations. It’s absurd, but intentionally so. The film uses surreal humor to reveal how much of motherhood is shaped, staged, and scrutinized.

As the dinner unfolds, the room shifts. The space becomes stranger, warmer, almost fleshy, echoing the emotional overwhelm humming beneath the mothers’ perfect façades. The rituals at the table grow frenzied and hungry. What begins as polite sharing turns into a devouring — a metaphor for the pressures that consume mothers from the inside out while they maintain a curated image on the surface.

There’s no dialogue to soften or explain the descent. Instead, the tension blooms through movement, texture, and rhythm. The film trusts us to feel the discomfort of being watched, the anxiety of not measuring up, and the quiet panic of losing oneself in the performance of “good motherhood.”

By leaning fully into surrealism, Mothers and Monsters captures truths that straightforward storytelling might miss. It’s not condemning motherhood — far from it. It’s exposing the invisible cost of perfection, the emotional stretch marks no one posts about, and the cracked edges hidden behind every glowing family portrait.

The result is a short film that lingers: a visual confession, a whispered warning, and an invitation to step away from the banquet table long enough to breathe.