Metacritic reviews

Director Christophe Honore's respectable, tightly coiled, but ultimately unrewarding adaptation of Georges Bataille's posthumous novel.

Can't transcend its own suffocating milieu.

Based on a novel by French provocateur Georges Bataille, an important thinker whose fiction rarely translates into good cinema.

For all its shocking content, it remains a rather conventional psychological portrait of Oedipal attraction taken to a disturbing extreme.

So clinically detached it borders on absurd.

Ma Mère may be ludicrous, but its cast displays a commitment that deserves more than grudging admiration.

This tale of disaffected sexual depravity is practically a parody of the worst of French filmmaking.

Honoré never gets beneath these characters' sunburned skins, and well before the end, the film tips irretrievably over into the realm of absurdity.

Huppert is wonderful, as usual, and she's to be congratulated for taking this daring role. But, alas, even she can't save Ma Mere.

Degrading, disgusting and depressing.