Two women, Janis and Ana, coincide in a hospital room where they are going to give birth. Both are single and became pregnant by accident. Janis, middle-aged, doesn't regret it and she is exultant. The other, Ana, an adolescent, is scared, repentant and traumatized. Janis tries to encourage her while they move like sleepwalkers along the hospital corridors. The few words they exchange in these hours will create a very close link between the two, which by chance develops and c... (Full plot summary below)
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Two women, Janis and Ana, coincide in a hospital room where they are going to give birth. Both are single and became pregnant by accident. Janis, middle-aged, doesn't regret it and she is exultant. The other, Ana, an adolescent, is scared, repentant and traumatized. Janis tries to encourage her while they move like sleepwalkers along the hospital corridors. The few words they exchange in these hours will create a very close link between the two, which by chance develops and complicates, and changes their lives in a decisive way.
Leave your thoughts about Parallel Mothers.
| The GuardianPeter BradshawThe film allows you to ponder not just the mother-child bond – strong enough to confront fascism – but the way everyone has to let their children be influenced by strangers; the unintended upbringing of being out in the world. What an emotional experience. |
| Original-CinKaren GordonOn the surface, Parallel Mothers is an engaging melodrama centred around a fabulous performance by Penélope Cruz. But, as is typical of Pedro Almodóvar’s movies, this easygoing, entertaining film is deeply layered, dealing with issues of personal morality and family ties, mixed with a reminder of Spain’s dark and not-so-distant fascist past. |
| Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangThe genius of Parallel Mothers lies in the way it gathers up so many of its maker’s preoccupations — the heroic fortitude of women, the tragic absence of men — and rewires them in an unexpected and entirely necessary direction. It finds Almodóvar doing something new by doing what he has always done well: finding grace and beauty amid suffering, and keeping memory alive. |
| The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldAlmodóvar fills the movie with eloquent touches — scenes softly fading to black, music twisting like vines, an old house whose stories whisper in every corner, a baby’s watchful eyes, a past that informs a future. Generations pass, this wise movie tells us; family endures. |
| Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenMelodrama mixes with light-hearted touches, moral dilemmas, and historical reckoning in Almodóvar’s latest. |
| Time OutDave CalhounOnly Pedro Almodóvar could wrap a cry of pain about Spain’s inability to come to terms with its recent dark history into a gorgeous-looking melodrama about two mothers drawn by fate into a complicated, painful and ultimately nourishing relationship. |
| CineVueChristopher MachellVeteran Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, Parallel Mothers, is as much about his enduring fascination with motherhood as it is the capacity to heal through our connections to the past. |
| Little White LiesDavid JenkinsEvery shot, every narrative beat, every decision exudes not merely confidence, but the touch of a master. |
| Paste MagazineNatalia KeoganParticularly paired with Cruz’s knockout performance of a woman whose life endures the legacy left by the trauma of her family’s unresolved past, Parallel Mothers is a deeply political example of what is lost when we have forgotten—and what is achieved when we fight to remember. |
| Slant MagazineChuck BowenThe film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Pedro Almodóvar understands to be one in the same. |
