Reflective Encounters

“There are many that consider the birth of their child to be the greatest moment of their lives, with the act of parenthood idealistically portrayed with redemptive qualities, an opportunity to bring into the world something bigger than yourself. Yet with the overturning of Roe vs Wade in America there is an increasing awareness of the horrors of childbirth, which requires a full loss of bodily autonomy that irreversibly changes the self, a fact acknowledged by every body-horror artist from Cronenberg to Ducournau. Shengwei Zhou’s film ponders these concepts as well, through a stunning mix of stop motion, used for the faceless woodland creatures that populate this short, and glossy, synthetic CGI.

Within the film we witness the various anxieties of motherhood: from the process of childbirth to fears of inadequacy, bad influence and trauma, captured in a push-pull between candle-lit eldritch horror and bubblegum plastic utopia. It’s easy to get lost in the imagery, rendering the natural and familiar uncomfortable, with white sap oozing out of trees, which stands in for sources of life and the multicoloured putty which threatens to envelop all. The final transformation eventually comes to suggest that motherhood involves not just the surrender of the body but the full surrender of identity.”

— Matthew Chan