Reviews

The Girl, the Mother and the Demons is a powerful statement about the casting of a child's life. It is not the children who get to play the leading role in their life, but their caretakers. In the film, the mother Siri sets the rules for everything that is allowed and all that is forbidden, and Ti obeys to survive. In the midst of a psychosis, the rules become cruel. With these elements, it would be tempting to label the story under growing hatred and lost hope. This is however not the case. Ti may be left unfed, and her access to the bathroom may be denied, but her love towards her mother remains superior to the power of all the demons in the cluttered apartment. As the film zooms in to horrors that happen out of the reach of child welfare services, it calmly calls for new ways to recognize these cases and the overall pattern earlier. As Ti reaches out for her mother as a lighthouse to bring her back from the demons, the audience is offered a bird's eye view to see Ti standing in a blind spot for all other lighthouses to see her. It is excruciating to look at, yet something we need to see to fix it.