A young mother fends off her boss's unwanted advances -- and triggers memories of a monster.


MAMA'S WATCHING is used with permission from Dustin Curtis Murphy. Learn more at https://dcmfilmmaker.com.


Liz is a young mother on her first business trip away since her baby was born. But the trip proves complicated, as her boss Lloyd keeps coming onto Liz, getting more aggressive with each attempt.

His unwanted advances bring up memories of a troubling childhood event, involving a monstrous figure called Mama, which took vengeance on an attacker when she was a kid. Now Liz must reckon with the trauma of her past, as well as the monster that has haunted her all her life.

Directed by Dustin Curtis Murphy and written by Rose Muirhead, who also stars as Liz, this horror short has the hallmarks of its genre, with pulse-pounding storytelling and an eerie, frightening monster at its core. But it's also a psychological excavation of how parenthood can open up the doors to past issues, and how these can rear themselves again and again until we tackle them head-on. When Liz has an encounter reminiscent of a harrowing one in her past, intense memories and emotions come flooding back, the most frightening of which is a hag-like monster called Mama.

The memories of Mama are rendered in a visceral, stylized but fragmented style, with lurid cinematography and almost surreal angles and framings emphasizing various disintegrations between reality, fantastical visions and the self. Even with the almost phantasmagorical images, the horror and threat of a childhood attack come through. But Liz's present, portrayed in a muted, naturalistic mode, is much more seemingly serene, reflecting perhaps her domestic contentment. She's reluctant to travel and leave her baby, but she does, only to be met with the aggressive attempts of her boss to seduce her.

These attempts force Liz to relive her past trauma, giving her and viewers a more sustained sense of what happened. As an actor, Muirhead plays the functioning capable woman and worker that Liz has evolved into, but also shades that grown-up calm and confidence with a sense of being haunted by the past. That past comes back at her when Floyd comes onto her, his attempts escalating into violence. As the intensity ratchets up, Liz hits a breaking point, fighting for her life and bringing the specter of Mama back into the world again.

MAMA'S WATCHING falls into the tradition of psychological horror, where the tropes and symbols of the genre allow the story to examine knotty, difficult and often frightening emotional terrain in a visceral yet metaphorical way. Here, the writing and directing take advantage of the genre's immediacy, grounding us in Liz's terrible past and her uneasy present, showing how they echo off one another. It's interesting that, in many ways, Liz and the film seem to fear Mama almost more than her attackers. But it's only when she addresses the monster directly that she truly comes to peace, albeit a hard-won one.