★★★
An Indonesian domestic horror where betrayal curdles into ritual menace, Randolph Zaini adapts a viral Jeropoint thread into bad-mommy dread, soaked in blood and milk.
The setup is classic for Indonesian horror: a broken home, the father abandoning his family, and the mother left to patch things together. In flashback he walks out, Yanti (Artika Sari Devi) screaming as she clutches at his feet. Trying to reinvent herself, Yanti opens a salon and presents a glamorous new face to the world, but to her children Vira (Aurora Ribero) and Dino (Ali Fikry) she seems less like a parent and more like an intruder wearing their mother’s skin. And how come her badly-placed salon is so strangely successful?
For long stretches the film leans into melodrama, its pacing uneven, but that slow burn sets up some strong twists. Ritual practices surface in the background: ajian, rajah, hints of bargains struck for beauty and success. The house itself becomes a stage for menace. When the film cuts loose, it does so with conviction: a cathartic scream that blows the windows out, a razor-to-egg cut that recalls Buñuel.
Artika Sari Devi is magnetic and terrifying, shifting from maternal warmth to feral violence without warning. Ribero and Fikry bring raw vulnerability, their fear anchoring the story. Zaini frames them tightly in domestic interiors, the rooms shrinking around them as their mother’s presence grows monstrous.
The film’s origins lie in a viral horror thread by the X user Jeropoint, a story that spread quickly through Indonesian social media in 2023 under the title Dia Bukan Ibu (“She Is Not Mother,” a little more on the nose in terms of narrative revelations). Told from the perspective of a teenage girl unsettled by her mother’s sudden changes, the thread blended everyday details of divorce and a struggling salon with whispers of occult practice. Zaini’s adaptation keeps that title for its Indonesian release, while the international version has been retitled A Woman Called Mother (perhaps to avoid confusion with Irish horror You Are Not My Mother.)
Placed against the wider map of Indonesian horror, A Woman Called Mother sits in a tradition where the family home becomes a site of dread and the maternal body a vessel of both power and fear. From Pengabdi Setan to Joko Anwar’s Impetigore, the genre has drawn strength from rituals, folklore, and women at its centre. Zaini’s film shares that DNA but trades ghosts for a viral tale of everyday horror pushed into the surreal. It slows in the middle, yet the set-pieces hit with lasting force and images that stake their claim in the canon of Indonesian horror.
A Woman Called Mother played at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX
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