Mater

Rarely have I see a movie with such great dramatic set-ups yet such poor follow through as Mater.

Mater follows a lesbian couple named Celeste and Lena who go to unnecessarily intense lengths in order to have a child. Dreaming of a baby, Lena and Celeste scope out a nightclub for potential baby daddies. They decide on a man called Dario. Dario is a rich man-child with a controlling mother. He is unaware of Celeste’s true reason for having sex with him. When Dario refuses to have sex with Celeste without a condom, Celeste and Lena turn to rape. Obviously, Dario is upset by this, to put it lightly. Dario ends up discovering the identity of his attackers because Lena’s mother is Dario’s mother’s maid. Dario becomes attached to the idea of having a child. He begins to blackmail/negotiate with Celeste and Lena for care of the child, turning to his mother for help. This incident brings Dario’s complex relationship and feelings regarding his mother to the surface.

There’s a lot of potential for drama in Mater. There’s desperate lesbians, rape, severe mommy issues and custody of an unborn child. Yet Mater fails to follow through. There’s only two memorably dramatic scenes in the movie; the rape scene and the scene where all the lead characters meet up to negotiate who gets the unborn child. And I still think that second scene could have been twice as dramatic as it was. The rest of the movie is made up by what feels like filler. I guess it’s supposed to be character development. But it’s largely unsuccessful. I don’t end this movie feeling like I know these characters. They still feel shallow and I feel at most a surface-level understanding of them.

It genuinely feels like whoever made this film was given bad advice about how focusing too much on drama is for plebs or something. Mater genuinely seems to try and avoid scenes that would lead to big, dramatic dialogues. This is additionally weird because this film was initially a play. Generally, I presume that plays are made up of grand, dramatic dialogue scenes between characters. I don’t know where these scenes went when it was time to adapt this for film but it’s a huge mistake that they either took them out or didn’t have them in the first place.

I can’t believe I’m saying this about a WLW film, but Mater didn’t deserve a happy ending. Admittedly, the focus of this happy ending is Dario. However, Celeste and Lena still get everything they wanted with little to no consequence. These women committed a rape! A fully unnecessary one too! They could’ve easily found a different guy at a nightclub willing to engage in unprotected sex. Seeing Celeste, Lena and Dario all live happily together with their child when this relationship started out of rape is a bad ending. Especially because the middle of the film failed to develop these characters or relationships enough to get to a place where this ending would have made sense.

Overall, Mater has some interesting ideas but absolutely no follow-through. It’s incredibly frustrating. The movie is fine to look at and I have no complaints about the acting but the story is such a let-down. I’m genuinely baffled as to how many opportunities Mater missed to do good or at least interesting scenes. There’s nothing to this movie even though it could have been something. It’s a disappointment.

Overall rating: 3.4/10

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