Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Weathering’ On Netflix, Where A Mother is Haunted After The Death Of Her Child

Netflix’s Weathering is a sharp, if not a little predictable, commentary on what happens when Black women are ignored. After a mother loses her baby in childbirth, she’s haunted by the loss and can’t shake the fact that everyone around her ignored her concerns. Her grief manifests and she just can’t shake the literal and figurative demons around her.

WEATHERING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A pregnant woman lies on a bed in a hospital. “I feel like I can’t breathe…There’s something wrong,” she says. Someone quickly reassures her, “Honey, this is what labor feels like.” This voice then adds, “There’s nothing wrong, you’re fine. It’s all in your head,” just before the pregnant woman begins to convulse.

The Gist: Alexis Louder plays Gemina, a pregnant woman whose baby daughter dies during childbirth. Over the course of this twenty minute short film, we’re shown all the ways that Gemina tried to tell her doctors that something was wrong with her pregnancy, but all of her concerns were written off. As a result, she experienced near-fatal blood loss during childbirth, and her infant didn’t survive.

Weathering is not subtle about its message, that Black women are not listened to, not to be trusted with their own instincts, and it conveys that message by depicting the tormented hallucinatory images Gemina conjures up in the aftermath of her loss. Gemina not only suffers the loss of a child, but she’s abandoned by her partner, Shawn (Behzad Dabu) who can’t cope with what has happened. Lucky for him, he’s able to simply walk out on the situation, while Gemina is left to process it all, her body scarred, her mind unable to escape it.

Alone in her home, Gemina is haunted by images both real and imagined: flashbacks of her bloody childbirth and appointments with her dismissive doctors are spliced between wild visions of a hooded figure beating her to a pulp, of her pregnant body being sliced open as if she’s the main course at a banquet. Strange things keep happening to her; her locked front door opens, her body is throttled, and she is haunted by whatever this unseen force is doing to her.

After one incident where her body is beaten by this faceless apparition, her friend James (Jermaine Fowler) comes to check on her, but even his presence is sinister, as he tries to force himself on her and then acts disgusted when she rejects him. His bitterness and cruelty toward her is proof that the demons Gemina faces aren’t all figments of her imagination.

All the while, Gemina faces a writing deadline and her boss keeps checking in to make sure she’s working on it. Gemina’s in no headspace to focus on this but, in another example of how women are just expected to smile and cope, she keeps emailing her boss that all is well and she’ll make that deadline, no problem. In the climax of the film Gemina’s body is dragged from her bed, beaten, and thrown into her pool where she is held under water by the hooded figure. When the hood is revealed, it’s her own face she sees. Realizing that she has become a demon in her own mind, she sets to work on her writing assignment, titled, “What will it take to protect Black women?”

What Will It Remind You Of? Weathering brutally depicts the psychological trauma that comes with child loss. It reminds me of Bed Rest, the Melissa Barrera film where she plays a grieving mother who experiences horrific visions after the death of her baby.

Our Take: Written and directed by Megalyn Echikunwoke, Weathering is an honest but almost cruel depiction of the way that women, Black women in particular, are forced to deal with their trauma. The film uses the distressingly high mortality rate of Black mothers as a starting point, but layers in all the ways that women are expected to accept their societal role as polite receivers; receivers of attention, of information, of job opportunities, of sexual advances – we should be grateful that our fates are in someone else’s hands. Gemina is haunted by the fact that she allowed herself to be so polite, and it led to the death of her child, it led her to these haunting visions, and it’s only once she pushes that hooded figure off of her that she’s able to finally use her voice again.

The film is a heavy 20-minute watch, the intensity of Gemina’s trauma and solitude is dense and thick, and though you pretty much know from the get-go what point the film is trying to make, the haunting, self-inflicted violence captures the mindset of so many women so effectively.

Sex and Skin: Gemina is nude at one point, though only seen from the back.

Parting Shot: Gemina, having overcome at least some of her self-destructive thoughts, sits on her bed with her laptop in front of her, typing out the title to her assignment.

Sleeper Star: Alfre Woodard’s brief cameo as Gemina’s no-nonsense mother smartly blends support with unhelpful motherly commentary as she denounces Shawn and derides Gemina’s decision to give birth in a hospital. In just a few short moments on screen, she expertly conveys that motherly “I love you…but I told you so” tone.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Gemina is told at the top of the film, “There’s nothing wrong, you’re fine. It’s all in your head,” that’s symbolic not just of the way her concerns were dismissed on the delivery table, but throughout her life.

Our Call: I really hate the T-word but here we go: There’s a lot of triggering stuff in Weathering. From child loss to near sexual assault, Gemina experiences a lot and it can feel hard to watch, depending on your sensitivity to such things. That said, the message of the film is so valuable and the film presents an underrepresented perspective we don’t often see, so it maybe worth sitting through the discomfort. STREAM IT.