BEYOND FEST SCREENING 2026 – Two questions become paramount while viewing this highly effective short. How much of our parents do we carry with us into adulthood, and when the time comes to become parents ourselves, can we avoid repeating their mistakes?
Those questions sit at the heart of Marge, a darkly compelling 15-minute short written and directed by Michael Prieto and Julia Kern that begins with Sadie (Devon Ross), a sombre young woman sitting alone, smoking a cigarette and holding what appears to be a positive pregnancy test.
Through her thoughts, Sadie addresses her unborn child, wondering whether they will ever actually meet and whether, if they do, she will be anything like her own mother — a woman we come to learn she knows simply as Marge.
From there, Marge takes us back to Sadie’s childhood, where Young Sadie (Liv Davenport) is decidedly unhappy about an oversized school uniform. She complains that it doesn’t fit and that she looks ridiculous while her mother, Marge (Rachel Matthews), appears far more interested in smoking and watching television than dealing with her daughter’s latest crisis.
There’s something strangely natural and initially quite funny about their relationship. They interact less like a conventional mother and daughter and more like a pair of mismatched friends. Marge is dismissive, sarcastic and casually inappropriate, at one point warning Sadie that if she doesn’t go to school, she’ll end up a “cocaine addict.” Not really the loving and encouraging words one might expect a mother to use to coax their child into attending school. However, it emphasises that mate ship like bond between the two over a normal and natural mother / daughter relationship.
Matthews and Davenport make these exchanges feel surprisingly believable, and that natural chemistry becomes important when Marge begins revealing that something considerably darker exists beneath this unconventional domestic life.
One particularly effective moment sees the melodramatic young Sadie pretending she has been stabbed and collapsing onto the floor. Marge initially watches her daughter’s performance with rolling eyes before seemingly imagining blood spreading across the carpet beneath her. For a few seconds, her expression changes completely.
Then the moment passes.
This is our first real indication that Marge just might be veering somewhere considerably more disturbing than its opening scenes suggest.
A baby monitor subsequently introduces strange sounds from elsewhere in the house prompting a switch in Marge’s laid back and casual temperament to one of fury and anger while a pad-locked door in the lounge provides another clue that there are things about Marge’s life her daughter doesn’t fully understand. If I said too much more here it would spoil the short’s most effective change of direction, but Sadie eventually witnesses something no child should ever have to see.
What works particularly well is that Prieto and Kern don’t feel compelled to explain everything afterwards. We aren’t given a detailed history of what has happened behind that locked door or why. Instead, the film appears more interested in what witnessing something horrific does to a child who then has to carry that experience into adulthood.
The photography and sound help considerably, but it’s the performances that really hold this piece together. Matthews manages to make Marge simultaneously familiar, funny, neglectful and increasingly disturbing, while Davenport convincingly plays a child for whom her mother’s unusual behaviour is simply part of everyday life. Ross has considerably less screen time but gives the adult Sadie a weariness that connects effectively with the childhood we have witnessed.
The return to adult Sadie also brings the opening pregnancy test into much sharper focus. She appears to recognise that what happened during her childhood wasn’t her fault; she was an unsuspecting victim of circumstances she couldn’t possibly have understood or controlled.
But Marge leaves us with a more uncomfortable question: can we recognise the damage our parents might have caused us and still escape their influence in later life?
That idea is encapsulated brilliantly in the film’s final moments. Without giving away exactly how it gets there, a seemingly small choice involving Sadie’s own young daughter suddenly gives the name “Marge” much greater significance.
Has Sadie simply come to understand her mother differently with age? Is she unconsciously repeating behaviours she grew up around? Or does she fear there may be considerably more of Marge inside her than she would ever want to admit?
Unlike horror that mistakes a lack of explanation for depth, Marge gives us enough to understand its emotional story while allowing the darker details to remain in the shadows. In just under 15 minutes, it moves convincingly from a dysfunctional family drama into something far more disturbing without losing sight of the mother-daughter relationship that sits at its heart and successfully giving the viewer enough questions, no matter how disturbing they might be, to mull over.
The film wisely doesn’t answer those questions. And that’s an effective conclusion to leave us with. It certainly left me considering this: Are the traits and things we inherit from parents the same things we spend our entire lives trying not to become?
