- Director: Chloé Cinq-Mars
- Writer: Chloé Cinq-Mars
- Stars: Rose-Marie Perreault, Simon Landry-Desy, Marie Bèlanger
We see it every year during Mothers’s Day: the romanticized notion that pushing a human being out of your body is only painful for that specific moment, but everything else is snuggles, coos and undying love, both for your child and from your child. And while having a baby is an undeniable privilege, there’s a reason so many horror movies, especially from female filmmakers, focus on that very specific time when you first bring the baby home.
Showing at the Fantasia International Film Festival, psychological horror Peau Á Peau is both a haunting and heartbreaking look at that very fragile phase known as postpartum. For a lot of women, this is a mentally and emotionally fraught time that can very quickly spiral into serious mental health issues. Far from the idyllic, love soaked time that people believe it to be, it can be strangely isolating, exceptionally terrifying and physically painful on multiple levels. Writer/director Chloé Cinq-Mars does not shy away from the cracked nipples, lack of sleep, loss of self and the various trespasses that pregnancy and child birth leave on your body. Rather, her and star Rose-Marie Perreault bask in all of the ugly glory and manage to showcase the beauty in all of it.
We meet Pénélope (Perreault) when she is woken up by the screams of her baby. After her partner proves to be of zero help, she decides to take a walk to calm the baby and this is when she accidentally witnesses a hold up at a market. This event proves to be the catalyst that pushes her already fragile mental state over the edge into hallucinations, paranoia, and guilt over both the past and the present. Perreault delivers a standout performance that takes the viewer on an emotional roller coaster of sympathy, concern and rage. Truly, the amount of times she puts her baby in peril is anxiety inducing, yet through it all, you know that she meant what she said at the opening of the film when she tells her son that he is the love of her life.
Constantly surrounded by people who provide unsolicited and unhelpful advice in lieu of actually helping her out, Pénélope slides deeper and deeper into psychological collapse. The only time we see her happy is the one time that both her partner and their shared friends speak to her and treat her like the adult woman that she is. As she faces buried trauma, Pénélope looks in all of the wrong places for solace while the viewer is treated to an unfolding mystery and an intimate look at the isolation of new motherhood. The horror and anxiety is visceral and while Peau Á Peau feels like an emotional assault at times, this is exactly why it succeeds on every level to showcase the, potentially fatal, silence that surrounds maternal mental health. Cinq-Mars and Perreault both excel at illustrating such a delicate time of life with all of the horror that it is naturally infused with.
Played at Fantasia International Film Festival
Lisa Fremont
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