PARK CITY, Utah—At the start of The Moogai, an unsettling and at times utterly terrifying Sundance Film Festival premiere from Australian director Jon Bell, it’s hard to tell what, exactly, our protagonist Sarah (Shari Sebbens) has against her biological mother. Any time Ruth (Tessa Rose) offers her daughter some help, Sarah coldly brushes her off and protests that she’s not her real mother.
As the story unfolds, however, the reasons for Sarah’s coldness grow clearer both to us and to Sarah herself, who by the end of the movie is sobbing out apologies for failing to figure it all out sooner. The origins of her fractured maternal relationship actually stretch back decades to a chapter of colonialist history that Bell says Australia has yet to fully process—the “Stolen Generations” of Indigenous children that various institutions abducted from their parents to place in white homes.
The Moogai—which comes from Causeway Films, the production company behind both The Babadook and Talk to Me—brings that haunting history to life with the birth of Sarah’s own newborn, Jacob, whose troubled birth winds up highlighting how even now mothers of color can find themselves perilously over-policed. The titular monster in The Moogai, a wrinkled white creature with long talons and two faces, is a horrifying and effective stand-in for Australia’s sordid history.
Throughout the film, the creature lurks over Sarah and her family from the shadows, whispering to her small daughter, Chloe, when no one’s watching. Only Sarah and Chloe seem to be able to see the Moogai. Sarah stops sleeping thanks to her nightmares of a little girl with white eyes who warns, “He’s watching,” and she’s breaking their breakfast eggs because she swears she saw the bloody corpses of baby chicks inside them. Her husband, Fergus (Meyne Wyatt), doesn’t know what to do as she becomes increasingly erratic. At every beat in this story, Sarah can feel the walls of white institutions closing in on her, making her all the more frantic at the prospect of losing her children.
The Moogai is actually an expansion of Bell’s identically titled short film from 2020, and each of its additions deepen the feature’s frightening narrative—especially Ruth and her tragic family backstory. The Moogai’s stalking initially heightens the tension between all three generations of women, as Sarah shuns her mother’s superstitious explanations and resents her daughter’s innate interest in her heritage. Ultimately, however, their shared trauma binds them closer with mutual understanding.
Sebbens and Wyatt both reprise their roles from the short, and Sebben’s casting in particular makes The Moogai’s story more resonant. An Aboriginal actress who once worried she’d always need to “play white” for the rest of her career, Sebbens captures the tension within Sarah’s identity as someone who can “pass.” In the beginning, she seems to believe that none of the horrors her Aboriginal mother describes could ever happen to her, but with each betrayal after Jacob’s birth, she comes to realize just how easily that privilege can dissolve. While Wyatt excels at playing the loving but (at least initially) clueless husband, Sebben’s performance is a marathon of gut-punching intensity. Each of her shrieks cuts a little more deeply than the last, and as she thrashes against everyone who would suppress her, the panicked rage building up in her body becomes palpable.
Bell does not bother to hide much beneath the surface here, instead drawing and underscoring the parallels within The Moogai’s narrative for good measure. The hand-holding can feel a little tiresome, particularly toward the end when Sarah begins explaining the lessons she’s learned aloud just to make sure we caught them. More broadly, the film’s ending feels somewhat deflated, weighed down by decisions and dialogue that feel more convenient than artistic.
Still, Bell’s imagery is striking, and his final shot mimics the unforgettable final shot of his short film—with an unsettling choreographed flourish added in for good measure. Overall, this allegory is all the more disturbing for the truth that it represents; when deployed properly, there’s nothing quite like reality to make a horror story all the more haunting.