Institute History
Description
A young Aboriginal couple bring home their second baby. What should be a joyous time takes a sinister turn as the mother starts seeing a malevolent spirit she is convinced is trying to take her baby.
Adapted from his award-winning short and made with the Producer of The Babadook and Talk to Me, Jon Bell’s debut feature draws from Indigenous lore for a thematically rich supernatural tale that quickly establishes the lurking menace of a child-stealing spirit. Its simmering suspense empathetically builds around the fragile psychology of a new mother, blurring the lines between exhaustion, paranoia, and postpartum depression. In exacerbating her isolation and hopelessness, Bell shrewdly accentuates traditional tools of oppression to reveal a darker allusion to Australia’s stolen generations—the tens of thousands of First Nations children forcibly removed from their families through the government’s assimilation policies—which the filmmaker calls a “massive wound in the psyche of Australia.” The Moogai bears its terrifying resonance out of sublimated trauma.—JN
Available in person. Also available online for credentialed press and industry (January 24–28).
Screenings include closed and open captions, as well as audio description.