John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent A founding mother of the Newest Catalan Cinema, Mar Coll, throughout a now 20 year career, has consistently questioned established thought, whether Catalan upper middle-class hypocrisy and emotional paralysis (“Three Days With the Family”), the comic patriarchy of paternal narcissism (“Matar al Padre”) and the superiority of Scandinavian social models (“The Is Not Sweden”).
In “Salve Maria,” which world premieres in main international competition at Locarno, Coll questions a taboo, even for many in 2024: Whether all women are cut out for motherhood.
Largely directing her earlier works in a naturalist mode, “Salve Maria” marks a career departure, casting the film as a genre-bending psychological thriller.
Maria, a promising novelist and new mother, is increasingly haunted by the threat of a monster: Herself. She happens across a newspaper article that comes to obsess her about a French woman in Barcelona who has drowned her 10-month-old twins in the bathtub. “From that moment, the specter of infanticide looms over Maria’s life as a haunting possibility,” the synopsis runs.
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