Mommy

Diane, a widowed working-class mother, takes her impulsive teenage son Steve out of a care facility after his behaviour makes him unmanageable elsewhere. Their life together swings between tenderness and sudden violence, and a shy neighbour, Kyla, is gradually drawn into the household and steadies it for a time, until the hope of an ordinary future comes under strain.

The film stages the raw intensity of the mother-child bond: its fusion and aggression, its guilt, and the shared fantasy of rescue that both sustains and traps the pair. For clinicians it is a vivid study of attachment under pressure and of a parent's love that cannot be enough on its own. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2014.