WRITER / DIRECTOR

PRODUCER: JADEY DUFFIELD

Lilith is being taken over from the inside… disappearing from the world. Slowly, but surely, her family and friends and medical professionals stop listening to her, stop hearing her, stop seeing her. Ignored more and more in the motherhood process, society’s disregard of Lilith’s desires, and of her own sense of identity begins to have physical manifestations. Lilith begins to fall apart; literally.

Blood, viscera, rent bones and torn flesh pierce the sugary glaze of soft pink pillows and talcom powder. Yummy Mummy bursts through the common representation of pregnancy like a long-caged animal escaping from its bonds.

Yummy Mummy is an exploration of the loss of identity during pregnancy and early motherhood: When one person becomes two, then attempts to become only one, once again. It highlights the emotional conflict of the mother-and-child symbiosis, and the mental health struggles a lot of women face when choosing to become mothers.

A dissociative loss of selfhood is intrinsic to the body horror genre, but traditionally this comes as a direct result of internal physical transformations. For Lilith though, it is only a secondary consequence to external factors, for in the eyes of those around her she is no longer Lilith: she is The Bump. For the majority of Yummy Mummy its commentary on how the pregnant are treated is played for absurdist laughs: the beleaguered other-to-be enduring a rotating parade of in-laws, health workers and strangers proffering their unsolicited advice in the presence of The Bump, whilst increasingly neglecting the well-being of its bearer.

However, the horror of the situation soon escalates: after her mood-lifting cinema visit is admonished as a nutritional catastrophe, Lilith’s agency is diminished further, her state increasingly resembling a psychosis-laced form of locked-in syndrome. The film’s sobering final scene seems to carry an additional metaphorical resonance in the light of the recent overturning of Roe v Wade in the United States: when The Bump is elevated to the sacrosanct, the person bearing it is implicitly demoted to the status of its mere vessel.

• Jonathan Bygraves, Encounters Festival 2022

YUMMY MUMMY was a BFI NETWORK funded film produced by Dreammore Films