Young Mothers reemphasizes the Dardennes' skill with fraught, complicated humanity

Together these stories provide yet another showcase for the Dardennes’ skill with simple, effective characters who have recognizable impulses and fears. One of the ways they achieve this is by centering each woman in the shot, resigning their boyfriends and families to the edges of the frame. When Perla’s boyfriend stubbornly stomps away from her, the camera holds not on his anger or momentum but on Perla’s crestfallen expression. Men float in and out of the story, but women are the ones tending care. The home’s attendants and the protagonists’ fellow mothers overlap in sweet ways, pockets of soft gentleness against the unrelenting concrete grey of their city. 

In a revealing sequence, Jessica is struck by the distance she feels from her newborn baby. She stares longingly at her daughter’s reflection in the bathroom mirror, admitting that “I was so excited to hold you against me. I feel nothing.” The camera then follows her across a silent scene of putting her baby to bed and collapsing in tears. Jessica’s head is buried in her bedsheets, her frame shaking with sobs. The camera holds as Ariane approaches, discernible only from the back of her head. She offers a despondent Jessica words of reassurance, covering her torso, leaning towards her head. Both characters are faceless, distinguishable only by how their bodies tangle together.

Young Mothers is filled with several visual moments like this, that speak to a kind of casual interconnectedness—a running theme in the brothers’ work. A disarming empathy governs all of the Dardennes’ projects, and it’s that sensitivity that carries into the conclusion of Young Mothers, which sees the core characters through foster care, marriage, and relapse.

While Young Mothers deploys the filmmakers’ disarming brand of compassion, the decision to split the runtime across a quartet of main characters does mean that each woman feels more like a conduit for different forms of motherhood than a fully-fledged person in their own right. But despite this leading to the film’s place as a slighter project in the directors’ oeuvre, there is still something profoundly enriching about their pared-down approach. Even in the more shallow form of Young Mothers, the Dardennes’ work emphasizes that there is little that’s more cinematic than complicated people surviving difficult circumstances.

Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Writer: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Starring: JanaÏna Halloy Fokan, Babette Verbeek, Elsa Houben, Lucie Laruelle
Release Date: January 9, 2026

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