What starts out looking like a trippy, swirling nebula before the opening credits run for Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant (2026) turns out to be Mary (Hannah Lynch) dipping potato chips into ice-cream. This quickly sets up the bond between real and unreal in ways you might already be expecting, given the film’s title. This is a comic body horror with a kind of slacker sensibility, interweaving a few dashes of deeper meaning into a nicely thought-out world of ick.
Back to Mary (Hannah Lynch): she’s about thirty, has an overbearing mother called Cynthia (Yvette Parsons), little taste for adult responsibilities, no realistic future prospects and a liking for pervy anime – like, a real liking for it. As Mary navigates a world where mum can just barge in on any intimate moment she might have going, attention turns to their new neighbours: prim single mum Ann (Jackie van Beek) and her own shut-in of an adult son, Boo (Arlo Green). Perhaps seeing the shared (lack of) interests, Cynthia wastes no time in trying to set the pair of them up, but that’s without knowing the extent of Boo’s unusual anatomy (unsurprisingly, given what we find out, Ann has a strange conception story of her very own). It doesn’t make much difference anyway, as Mary and Boo meet under their own steam in the shared laundry facilities. They hit it off enough that he is soon explaining exactly how he’s ‘differently bodied’ to most boys; in fact, he decides to show her. One thing leads to another and no sooner is the ice well and truly broken, than Mary finds she is expecting.
It’s not a normal pregnancy – since when did genre film concern itself with normal pregnancy? – but Cynthia is soon over the initial shock and into prospective grandma mode, despite the fact that Mary is doing her best to express her extreme dislike of this new scenario. Mary wants an abortion, leading to a hilarious sequence of events where it transpires that the baby is good where it is, thanks, but when it’s clear that this is the new reality she has to face, the people closest to her do indeed have to step up.
Hybrid humans, alien encounters and shock conceptions: all of this gets the daftest possible treatment, though the film sneakily adds a little bit of context which goes a long way, and gives the film a bit more substance than it might have had. There are a lot of conflicting and sometimes nebulous attitudes to motherhood floating around here, and it’s hard not to acknowledge that the alien pregnancy isn’t so different to a regular pregnancy, timeline excepted. Vomit? Rashes? Swelling? All perfectly normal. The film’s cheeky edit straight to a conventional ultrasound which also looks bloody weird is more evidence that director Sean Wallace and co-director/writer Jordan Mark Windsor know exactly what they’re doing. The film also points knowingly at all the obstacles to bodily autonomy thrown Mary’s way as soon as the foetus is in situ, whether that’s via bureaucracy or family pressures, exerting different kinds of pressure. Still, Boo winds up getting a bit if it, too, though you won’t miss the fact that his genitalia look a bit, well, female, hence perhaps the permission-free medical interest in him – and this isn’t the only way the tables are turned on Boo, either, which is good, because it leads to a different conclusion than audiences may be expecting.
The film is peppered with absolutely ridiculous one-liners throughout, all delivered totally deadpan by a small but well-selected cast, whose faces will be familiar to anyone who’s seen a bit of cult Kiwi cinema and TV over the years (The Rule of Jenny Pen; What We Do in the Shadows; Wellington Paranormal; there’s even some Bad Taste on the telly during the film, as well as a few moments of homage to Jackson’s own, ridiculous, vomity aliens). A weird but enjoyable mix of laidback comedy and pregnancy body horror, Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant offers a few non-obtrusive glimmers of real-world problems along the way, but it’s always offset by a tide of vomit, and getting that vomit/realism balance just right is an important skill in this kind of genre title.
Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant is on digital platforms from 2nd November.