If the response to Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024) — and the seemingly infinite amount of thinkpieces it inspired — has shown us anything, it’s that stories of gen x women reclaiming their sexuality on their own terms are hotter than ever. Now, even the Norwegians are in on the action with Don’t Call Me Mama (Nina Knag, 2025). Unfortunately, in pairing a middle-aged woman and an 18-year-old refugee, it’s not just as icky as the infamous Blame It On Rio (Stanley Donen, 1984) — it’s also as bad!
Eva (Pia Tjelta) is a teacher in a small town in Norway that has just opened its arms to plenty of new refugees from Syria. The scheme is the brainchild of her husband and Labour politician Jostein (Kristoffer Joner), who just happens to also be the town’s mayor. Now Eva is mad at Jostein, because he had an affair with one of his staff members, so when she strikes up a friendship with the enigmatic barely-adult Amir (Tarek Zayat), whose Danish is suprisingly impressive, it only becomes natural that she should invite him into her home and sleep with him every chance she gets.
In the right hands, this type of premise is ripe for exploitation, opening up conversations about the rights of immigrants, white liberal tears, the power dynamic between older women and young men and the dark heart of Scandinavian gesture politics. But under Knag’s stewardship, this debut feature fails to keep us invested, reaching for cliché, simplistic dialogue and easy answers instead of playing with the problematic heart of the idea. With so many ways of tackling the premise — erotic thriller, satire, straight-up skin flick — picking middle-of-the-road drama proves the most boring and uninteresting way of going about it.
The problem with Don’t Call Me Mama isn’t that it is inherently problematic. It’s that despite dealing with a taboo topic, it doesn’t actually tackle it in a particularly transgressive way. The relationship between Eva and Amir is exceptionally mawkish; their getting-to-know-each-other scenes in the local swimming pool (which is always eerily empty) scored by exceptionally plodding, on-the-nose music. And when they do finally get down to the sex scenes, there’s a tiny bit of desperation and discovery there, but it’s all filmed and handled far too politely — very little nudity; tasteful, beige lighting — for a film about a middle-aged woman so consumed by desire that she’s willing to destroy her entire life for it.
In the end, I can’t say it’s much better or worse than Blame It on Rio, where the then 50-year-old Michael Caine shacked up with the 17-year-old Michelle Johnson. But at least in that film, they all looked like they were having fun.
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.