"Madre" or "Mother" is a Spanish Spaniah-language short film made in 2016 and it premiered in 2017 and actually rather early in 2017, so it was a long road with many awards for this one until it finally managed to get nominated for an Oscar recently. The oldest of the five nominees in the live action short film category 2019. The writer and director is Rodrigo Sorogoyen, a really prolific Spanish filmmaker and certainly more experienced than the filmmakers in this category usually are. Same can be said about the cast. The two female actors we see are enjoying long careers and even the boy you only hear has appeared in more stuff than you'd expect already. We have mother and daughter (around the ages of 60 and 30) at home talking and the mother is wondering if the daughter has a new man in her life. Then a call from France comes in and it is the daughter's son who is there on holiday with his father, the man who is divorced from the woman the boy is calling. But the boy is alone somewhere at a beach in France as we find out quickly. The woman keeps calling friends who could help as well as the police to get help and find out what's going on and why the boy is not with his father. Eventually as the tension rises we find out that another man is approaching the son, probably not a police man as we find out from his activities, but it is unclear who he is because the battery on the son's phone has run low and is eventually empty the worst moment of all. Quite a coincidence, maybe too much of a coincidence? Anyway, I personally thought the man was harmless wondering why there is a little boy alone at the beach with no other person watching him over. This is of course also the most likely idea, but the woman is so scared and worried about her son being out there alone in a foreign country that she immediately expects the worst. Which could be true as well that the man is a predator, but we never find out. And never will. One of the film's most interesting aspects here is that we are always with the mother in terms of what she knows about what's going on. We see the beach at the very beginning and very end and it does not look pleasant, certainly this was the filmmaker's idea that seeing the beach after the film feels much more unpleasant than before when we knew nothing about what was going on. Other than that, the young woman seems really competent and has great efforts and ideas and organization talent what she can do and ask to make her son better. Already the question about the bars on the phone is one that I probably would not have thought of. I think it was a good short, already proven by the fact that I genuinely wondered what happened to the boy (and the father). It is deserving of an Oscar nomination. I have seen 3 of the nominees so far and I would put it above the Bulger film quality-wise and below Fauve. Children in danger in deserted ares seems to have been a thing at the Oscars these days. Go watch Madre. It is certainly worth these under 20 minutes.
Review of Madre
