Sundance 2026 Review: MUM, I'M ALIEN PREGNANT Pushes Sci-Fi Comedy Past Good Taste

Peter Jackson's pivot to mainstream filmmaking some three decades ago left a conspicuous vacuum in New Zealand splatstick, one only intermittently filled by revivalist curios like Black Sheep (2006) or Turbo Kid (2015). That lineage -- sticky, profane, cheerfully ill-mannered -- has become less a tradition than a dare.

Enter Sean Wallace and Jordan Windsor, the Kiwi duo known as Thunderlips, whose Sundance Midnight selection Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant approaches that dare with brazen literalism. The film announces its ambitions early, via a conspicuous insert from Jackson's 1987 calling card, Bad Taste, as if to say: yes, we know exactly what kind of mess we're trying to make.

The mess begins at home. Mary (Hannah Lynch), a millennial shut-in of elastic boredom, spends her days oscillating between junk food, hentai anime, and the general torpor of arrested development. Living with her mother, Cynthia (Yvette Parsons), does little to stabilize matters.

Cynthia is intrusive and pathologically incapable of respecting privacy; Mary is resentful, passive, and scarcely equipped for independence. Their domestic standoff is less a generational clash than a low-grade siege.

A new neighbor complicates the stalemate. Ann (Jackie Van Beek), another single mother, is quickly befriended by Cynthia, who clocks their shared predicament -- adult children still at home -- as a kind of grim social club.

Over tea, Ann reveals that her son, Boo (Arlo Green), is reclusive due to a physical deformity. Why she volunteers this information to a near stranger is unclear, though the film seems less interested in plausibility than momentum.

Cynthia, meanwhile, leaps to conclusions with her usual tactlessness, arriving -- almost miraculously -- at the correct one. She promptly shares Boo's secret with Mary, because discretion has never been her strength.

What follows is the film's most notorious sequence: an awkward nocturnal encounter in a communal laundry room that escalates from embarrassment to something far stranger. Thunderlips stages the reveal of Boo's condition with a mixture of clinical curiosity and adolescent glee, aided by prosthetic and puppetry work from McGregor Allen that leaves very little to the imagination. The effect is deliberately confrontational.

It's rare to see this kind of anatomical attention outside of pornography, rarer still in a genre film that expects to travel internationally. The moment unmistakably channels early Jackson -- less for its gore than for its commitment to bad taste as an organizing principle.

From there, Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant pivots into a frantic procedural, as Mary grapples with the consequences of the encounter. Her attempts to seek medical help are met with condescension, disbelief, and mansplaining.

Cynthia, perversely, regards the situation as a blessing: perhaps motherhood will finally snap her daughter into adulthood. The film's satirical targets -- medical paternalism, generational resentment, bodily autonomy -- are clear enough, though Thunderlips rarely pauses to refine them.

Instead, the directors lean into escalation. Mary's increasingly desperate efforts to terminate the pregnancy are staged as a series of grotesque set pieces, inventive in conception and punishing in execution. This is body horror played for laughs, though the laughs often catch in the throat.

There's a curious tonal tension at work: the film wants us to root for Mary even as it derives undeniable pleasure from her failures, each bringing us a step closer to a fully unleashed gross-out finale. At times, the structure resembles a twisted rom-com, with Boo cast as an unprepared, profoundly unfit love interest stumbling toward responsibility -- except that no amount of narrative tidying can erase what the audience has already been made to witness.

That may be the point. Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant isn't interested in redemption so much as endurance -- testing how far it can push its viewers before disgust slowly morphs into something akin to admiration. Thunderlips may not restore New Zealand splatstick to its former prominence, but they do prove the genre still has teeth, and that it's more than willing to bite the hand that feeds it.

The film premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.