Mothering Sunday

A visit home for Mother's Day turns into something far darker in this New Zealand horror-comedy short from first-time director Olivia McClymont. Stasia (Stasia Boyce) arrives to see her volatile mother (Pamela Kaval), bringing along the fact of her own life as a lesbian, and what starts as a familiar mother-daughter argument escalates, revelation by revelation, into genuine terror. McClymont plays the escalation for both laughs and dread, using the claustrophobia of a family home and the particular cruelty that only relatives can manage to build a seven-minute pressure cooker. Samantha Richardson co-stars as Josie. Made as a statement about the damage done by rejection inside the family, Mothering Sunday had its North American premiere as an official selection of San Francisco's Another Hole in the Head Film Festival in 2021. Here TV presents it as part of the Queer Quickies 204 anthology.