Young Mothers Review: When Kids Have Kids

The Dardenne brothers’ Young Mothers is a simple but moving tapestry of the hardships of teenage maternity. The young actresses shine.

The young mothers of the title are five teenagers, all residing in a Liège shelter for pregnant young women. Some have already given birth, while others are approaching their due date, but they support each other by providing company and routine. Their predicament as new mothers is difficult enough, but each one has additional pressures bearing down on them, which explain why they’re in the shelter and not with their families. The Dardennes challenge themselves to keep all these narratives going. Their films usually focus on one story, but Young Mothers succeeds in keeping (most of) its multiple elements going to the end.

Young Mothers opens on heavily pregnant Jessica (Babette Verbeek) waiting at a bus stop. From the first shot to the last, Benoît Dervaux’s camera keeps close to Jessica and the other mothers, using their faces as the primary (if not only) means of conveying the miles-deep emotions they carry. You can’t expect the Dardennes to diverge from their usual modus operandi of social realism; it’s been too successful in the past, and any attempt to add any sense of grander visual storytelling would only feel disingenuous in the context of their other films. They know the worlds in which the characters live and operate, and they let these young women and their actions speak for themselves.

Jessica is hoping to meet her biological mother for the first time, as her impending motherhood leads her to ask why her mother gave her up for adoption. Young Mothers isn’t so much about the struggle to raise children, as it is about the need to become adults faster than anticipated. Whether these young women want their children or not, they’re being forced into decisions for which they are scarcely prepared. Take Perla (Lucie Laruelle), for example. She wants the father of her child (Günter Duret) to make a home with her, but he’s fresh out of juvenile detention, and more interested in smoking weed and seeing friends. Despite Perla’s determination, the truth of the matter is that the selfishness and immaturity of others will dictate what she does next. This harsh reality has been a throughline in the Dardennes’ filmography, and proves particularly heart-rending here.

The Dardennes unite their characters in the realities that come with the creation of a family, though they take various forms. Julia (Elsa Houben) and her doting boyfriend (Jef Jacobs) are besotted with their baby daughter, but Julia’s attempts to recover from a drug habit threaten their attempts at a happy life together. This plotline is most reminiscent of the Dardennes’ Palme d’Or winner The Child (2005), in which another set of young parents finds themselves making poor decisions out of immaturity. Everything from the sweet chemistry between the couple, to shots of the pair zipping about on their scooter, recalls the Dardennes’ earlier triumph.

While some of the girls try to form families, others try to preserve what families they already have. Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan) attempts to reconcile with her abusive mother (Christelle Cornil) for the sake of her baby, but Ariane has to decide how badly she wants her family, considering the violence that comes with it. The Dardennes’ script (which took the screenplay prize at Cannes this year) is among their most ambitious, but the combination of heightened family drama with intertwining storylines threatens to morph into an all-out soap opera. The numerous throughlines of domestic abuse and abandonment are grounded by a uniformly excellent cast. In particular, the young women playing the mothers are incredibly committed to the emotions of the piece.

Particular credit must go to editors Marie-Hélène Dozo and Tristan Meunier; they ensure each of the mothers gets her share of screentime, and that each of their stories carries weight. However, the edit shows the Dardennes and their script aren’t entirely able to match their own ambition. One mother, Samia Hilmi’s Naïma, is shown to be doing well early on, and as a result her story is dropped less than halfway through, to the point it could have been excised altogether. As inelegant as this plotline is, it also shows the Dardennes adapting when their script threatens to escape their control. They see the four main stories as being strong enough to carry the film, and opt to cut out anything superfluous. If they attempt this narrative structure again, another draft of the screenplay should remove any such excesses earlier.

Like the girls trying to make better lives for their babies, Young Mothers isn’t perfect, but its commitment and heartfelt emotions see it through.

Young Mothers will have its International Premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 15 August, 2025 and will be screened again at the festival on 18-20 August. The film will be released in U.K. cinemas by Curzon on 29 August.