Mother Nocturna (2024) film Review

Daniele Campea’s 2024 Mother Nocturna (Madre Notturna) is a technically and atmospherically excellent film that is ultimately undone by its own commitment to ambiance and style over substance.

In this psychological horror inspired by The Bacchae, a wolf biologist has just been released from psychiatric care to live with her doctor husband Riccardo and now-grown daughter Arianna. The fraught relationship between Agnese and the rest of her family, who have understandably bonded in her absence, only grows with the pressure of care and Agnese’s quick decline.

Arianna is a quiet teenager with incredible dancing skills, who seems to express her complex emotions through expressive dance, which is also used to reflect the emotional flow of the film. These scenes are undeniably impressive; Sofia Ponente’s movements are incredible, reminiscent of some of the best scenes in the 2018 remake of Suspiria, and her no-nonsense attitude to boys her age is fantastic to watch.

Mother Nocturna 2024 woods at night

While Riccardo is determined to keep Agnese at home, and insists she’s much better, Arianna’s skeptical, and starts to notice odd behaviour coming from her mother. In the mornings, Agnese wakes up with mud and twigs at the foot of her bed; evidence of her nightly escapades. Riccardo is in full-on denial mode and tries to reconnect with his wife. She also seems to want to connect, but each of them is holding back a secret.

Once Riccardo is quarantined with Covid, it’s down to the two women to heal their relationship while trying to maintain some semblance of normality during a time of global panic.

This central relationship and Agnese’s mental decline make up the majority of the story – dialogue is pretty scarce, and the dim, atmospheric lighting does nothing to help understand the motivations of the family members. Aurally, it’s a misophonic nightmare, as the film makes great use of high-pitched whines to represent Agnese’s episodes.

As her mother becomes stranger, and without Riccardo to act as an intermediate, Arianna and Agnese begin to argue more and more. They’re each jealous of the other’s relationship with Riccardo, and while Agnese is resentful of him for various reasons, Arianna can only blindly defend the only parent she’s had for the last ten years. The relationship between Arianna and her parents is, frankly, Oedipal.

Mother Nocturna Arianna

It’s an understandably tense situation, unhelped by a past shared trauma, and the physical changes in Agnese that seem connected to both wolves and the moon. Soon she’s having visions and eating raw meat straight from the fridge, dripping blood and gnashing her teeth.

From a technical perspective, there’s a lot to enjoy about Mother Nocturna, but despite being less than an hour and a half long, it feels like it goes on forever. It accurately portrays a slow descent into madness by being incredibly slow-paced, with minimal drama and so much atmosphere that the interesting story and excellent acting are somewhat lost along the way.