Mother (2019 film)

Mother (original title Madre) is a 2019 Spanish-French psychological drama-thriller directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and written by Sorogoyen with Isabel Peña. It expands Sorogoyen's 2017 short film of the same name, an 18-minute one-shot thriller that won the Goya Award for Best Short Film and was nominated for Best Live Action Short Film at the 2019 Academy Awards.^{1 • 2} The feature premiered at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, where lead actress Marta Nieto won Best Actress in the Orizzonti section, and was released in Spanish cinemas on 15 November 2019.^{1 • 3}

From short film to feature

Sorogoyen and Peña decided to continue the story of the short because they felt it was unfinished, and because it let the original team work together again. In an interview at the Seville Film Festival, where the feature opened in November 2019, Sorogoyen said the team "wanted Madre to be a journey toward the light."¹ Peña, when Sorogoyen proposed the idea, was clear from the start that she was not interested in a typical kidnapping story; both wanted something new, centered on the aftermath, on how the loss had affected the protagonist.⁷

In his production notes, Sorogoyen describes abandoning the race-against-time story of a mother searching for her small child from a possible kidnapper in favor of the intimate story of Elena years later, living with her pain and struggling to leave the tunnel she fell into long ago.⁸ Although the film has been linked to directors such as Lars von Trier and Jaime Rosales, Sorogoyen has argued that Madre has much in common with French cinema, a cinema of gazes and silences that tells more through what is left unsaid; a reference he kept in mind throughout the shoot was Louis Malle's Le Souffle au coeur (1971), which also touches on an ambiguous relationship between a woman and an adolescent.⁷

Production

The film was produced by Amalur Pictures, Arcadia Motion Pictures, Caballo Films, Malvalanda, Le Pacte, and Noodles Production, with participation from RTVE, Movistar Plus+, TeleMadrid, Canal+, and Ciné+, and funding from the Spanish film institute ICAA.⁴ Àlex De Pablo was the director of photography, Olivier Arson composed the music, Alberto del Campo edited, and Lorena Puerto was the production designer.⁴ Filming took place at Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains and Seignosse in the Landes department of France, including the beach, the seaside restaurant, Elena's apartment, and Jean's family house.^{5 • 9} IMDb lists an estimated budget of €2,600,000 and a worldwide gross of $969,100.⁵

Reception

The film premiered in the Orizzonti section at Venice in September 2019, where Cineuropa's reviewer called it an exceptional feature and praised Sorogoyen's control.¹⁰ Critics singled out Marta Nieto's performance: Cinemanía's Andrea G. Bermejo called it one of the best performances of the year, and The Hollywood Reporter's Boyd van Hoeij described the film as an accessible art-house drama that, though it does not quite stick the landing, should consolidate Sorogoyen's reputation as one of Spain's brightest young talents.¹¹ Variety's Guy Lodge was more reserved, calling Madre an equivocal, splintered film by design, so full of broken-off ideas and emotions that a satisfactory ending is hard to foresee.¹¹ The film holds a Metascore of 73 on IMDb's linked Metacritic listing and an IMDb user rating of 6.6 from about 3,000 votes.⁵

Other 2019 films titled Mother

The year 2019 produced several unrelated films with the same English title, a frequent source of confusion. Mother (2019) by Kristof Bilsen is an 82-minute Belgian documentary, premiered at Sheffield DocFest, about Pomm, a Thai single mother who cares for Europeans with Alzheimer's disease in a Thai care center while a Swiss family prepares to say goodbye to their mother; it holds a 92% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes.^{12 • 13} A Japanese drama titled Mother (マザー), directed by Tatsushi Omori and starring Masami Nagasawa, runs 126 minutes and was released in Japan on 3 July 2020; it is inspired by a true event and portrays a boy raised under the twisted love of his alcoholic mother.¹⁴ A Brazilian drama Mãe (2019), directed by Adriana Vasconcelos, follows four generations of women in one family.¹⁵ Streaming listings for the Sorogoyen film in the United States and Spain appear under both "Mother" and its original title "Madre".¹⁶

References

1. Sorogoyen: "Queríamos que 'Madre' fuera un viaje hacia la luz", RTVE.es, 8 November 2019
2. Madre (cortometraje, 2017), Caballo Films
3. Así es 'Madre', la nueva película de Rodrigo Sorogoyen, RTVE.es, 24 July 2019
4. Mother (Madre), feature film, Caballo Films
5. Mother (2019), IMDb
6. Le Pacte line-up: Madre by Rodrigo Sorogoyen
7. Si te gustó 'As bestas', aquí tienes otro peliculón de Rodrigo Sorogoyen, RTVE.es, 16 December 2022
8. Notas de producción de Madre, por Rodrigo Sorogoyen (Golem distribution press kit)
9. Madre (2019), Cineyseries.net
10. Review: Madre, Cineuropa, 4 September 2019
11. Madre reviews, Movie'n'co
12. Mother, Flanders Image sales sheet (Kristof Bilsen documentary)
13. Mother (2019), Rotten Tomatoes
14. MOTHER (マザー), GAGA Corporation
15. Mãe (2019), JustWatch Brazil
16. Mother (2019) streaming, JustWatch US

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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