Materna

Name: Materna
Director: David Gutnik
Released: 2020

Synopsis

A psychological portrait of four women, whose lives are bound together by an incident on the New York City subway.

75
Original-Cin
While Gutnik has assembled a talented cast, the constraints of a 105-minute runtime means the stories feel underdone in places, including anything about that furiously entitled man in the subway.
60
Variety
The film is formally beautiful almost to a fault, giving it a schematic quality that’s at odds with its roiling emotions.
60
The New York Times
As it stands, the glue uniting these women of different ethnicities and backgrounds reads like a failed attempt to carve a more ambitious meaning out of individual stories already brimming with possibility.
58
The Film Stage
It’s tempting to blame the broadness of Materna on the short runtimes of each segment, Gutnik and his screenwriters having little time to establish and explore each character’s identity.
50
Slant Magazine
Rarely do the filmmakers show people mutually affecting one another in cycles of pain and control, rather than blaming phantom figures.
50
RogerEbert.com
The strongest point Gutnik makes with his film is that we all have a concealed story when we share common spaces in silence. But that sadly isn’t enough of a hook to carry out this scattershot effort.
50
IndieWire
Materna has some good ideas, but the surrounding landscape feels generic.
42
The Playlist
Ultimately, Materna feels like a hodgepodge of half-finished drafts from one-act plays, pompous short films, and dusty first screenplays.