Parallel Mothers Review

This is going to be a difficult film to review without spoilers so let's just go ahead and say that, if you haven't watched it and want to, you should stop right here!

Parallel Mothers started off well enough. An interesting take on the babies switched at birth trope, I was enjoying how the main character slowly starts suspecting something is amiss then battles her conflicting feelings when deciding what to do about it. The blow of finding out what happened to the other baby was well set up and made us viewers understand her dilemma. Her next step, of taking in the other mother and involving her in the baby's life made sense and seemed a fair compromise, given she wasn't ready to disclose her secret yet.

But then the film lost me. Why the need to create a romantic relationship between the two mothers?? I don't care if they're both women, a 40 year-old and a vulnerable 18 year-old who is dependant on the former for work, food, and home is creepy! But then even that wasn't fleshed out at all as we jumped straight to the reveal. And that's where things stopped making sense altogether. Do you really expect me to believe Janis would let Ana take the baby she has brought up for over a year without a fight? Without insisting that they talk it out?! Without any mention of the legality of the situation, not to mention the emotional fairness?? And then, magically, everything is fine the next day and Janis just "needs time to disconnect from the baby"? I was utterly appalled. This is not how people react!

But Almodóver wasn't done making a nonsensical film yet. With nothing more than a rather heavy-handed intro to set it up, the finale of the film has nothing at all to do with the main story. It's as if the filmmaker couldn't decide whether to make a film about switched babies or about the familial and emotional cost of the civil war so he tried to do both at the same time. I kept expecting some connecting thread, especially when we got a pointed close-up of the DNA kit ("Ooh, is she going to find out it wasn't her great-grandfather after all and she'll realise there's more to family than blood?") but no, there was none. Instead, the main story was tied up in an offensively tidy way, as if a new pregnancy would erase all the pain that had come before. And then we end on a quote about the war! What a shambles!


All in all, this could have been a solid movie but ended up just being a waste of time.


Conclusion: Nuh-uh [what's this?]


Parallel Mothers came out in 2021.

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