There is something wonderfully unruly about Mother Wolf, Suzi Yoonessi’s warm, funny and quietly fearless exploration of motherhood, womanhood and what happens when a woman who has spent decades caring for everyone else is finally forced to confront what she wants for herself.
Led by a superb Melissa Leo, the film feels refreshingly uninterested in presenting women, particularly older women, through the conventional cinematic lens. Instead, Yoonessi gives her characters permission to be complicated, sexual, angry, exhausted, selfish, loving, ridiculous and contradictory. It is the female gaze not as a statement or gimmick, but as the natural language of the film.
Leo plays Babs, a retired teacher whose life is disrupted when she finds herself caring for the children of her free-spirited daughter. What initially appears to be a story about a grandmother stepping in to hold a family together gradually becomes something richer: a portrait of a woman questioning where maternal responsibility ends and her own life begins.
Leo is magnificent. She has always been an actor capable of making toughness and vulnerability coexist in the same moment, and Mother Wolf gives her a role worthy of that gift. Babs can be ferocious one minute and painfully exposed the next. Leo never asks the audience to admire her character or even necessarily agree with her. She simply makes her completely, messily human.
Leo is magnificent.
Yoonessi’s direction is equally assured. There is tremendous confidence in the way she allows comedy and pain to sit beside one another without forcing either. The film can be genuinely funny, then unexpectedly tender, sometimes within the same scene. Crucially, Yoonessi never sentimentalizes motherhood. Love here is enormous, but it is also exhausting, inconvenient and occasionally humiliating.
Yoonessi’s direction is equally assured.
That honesty extends to the film’s treatment of sexuality and ageing. Mother Wolf allows an older woman to experience desire without turning it into a joke, a novelty or a message about how inspirational it is to still want sex after a certain age. Babs is simply a woman who remains alive to possibility. The result is both liberating and surprisingly moving.
The ensemble surrounding Leo is terrific. Kat Cunning brings an unpredictable energy that makes the mother-daughter dynamic feel genuinely lived-in, while Arian Moayed once again demonstrates his ability to bring enormous texture to seemingly small moments. Jodi Long, Mary Stuart Masterson and Matt Walsh round out an exceptionally strong cast, and Yoonessi gives each performer room to inhabit the film rather than simply orbit its star.
The ensemble surrounding Leo is terrific.
There is also something beautifully appropriate about Mother Wolf premiering at Woodstock. The fiercely independent production was shot there, including at Leo’s own home, and that intimacy seems embedded in the finished film. It doesn’t feel manufactured. It feels inhabited.
At its centre is a deceptively simple question: how far will a mother go for her children?
But Mother Wolf is clever enough to ask another one alongside it: how much of herself should she be expected to sacrifice along the way?
That second question is where Yoonessi’s film becomes particularly powerful.
Cinema has given us countless stories about mothers sacrificing everything for their families. Far fewer are interested in what happens after decades of that sacrifice — when the children are grown, when expectations remain, and when the woman underneath the word “mother” begins demanding to be seen again.
Yoonessi sees her.
And in Melissa Leo, she has found the perfect actor to make sure we do too.
★★★★★
Sonia Smith
