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There must be something really frightening in a 50-year-old woman deciding to give up her role as diligent housewife and mother, especially when it is the only one she can aspire to in a strictly patriarchal society. Manana (Nata Murvanidze), the heroine of Ana Urushadze’s strikingly daring and assured debut feature, is scary that way. Best First Feature at Locarno, winner of the Sarajevo Film Festival, and later selected as Georgia’s entry for Best Foreign Feature at the Oscars, Urushadze’s Scary Mother joins another 2017 Georgian female-centered festival darling, Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross’s poignant My Happy Family, to deliver an entrancing portrait of a woman who embarks on a mid-age quest to escape from a stultifying male-dominated world.

For Manana, the quest starts with a book. An aspiring writer who sacrificed her literary ambitions for a quiet homely life with a condescending husband and three kids,...

Scary is not exactly the word for this horror of a woman. Expecting something like a Japanese horror film, I was taken by surprise to learn that the scary part of this mother was her imagination. And to realize further that our imagination is shaped by the traumas of our childhood as ways of coping impacts powerfully on the psyche of whoever is watching it.

What begins as a happy family whose mother has taken time to write ends with the discovery that one’s imagination is more than mere images conjured up by a creative mind. Scary Mother develops this thesis into

A 50-year-old housewife struggles with her dilemma — to choose between her family life and her passion, writing, which she had repressed for years — and decides to follow her passion thus plunging herself into writing, sacrificing to it mentally and physically.

It takes a brave woman to depict...