March 10th, 2026

The Mouth Agape (Maurice Pialat, 1974)

Can a film be a prophecy? A premonition? Can it know something about our lives before we even live it? I watched Maurice Pialat's The Mouth Agape around a decade ago. At the time, it deeply affected and haunted me. I had no idea that, years later, I would live the events in the film as I watched my mother rapidly die of cancer. Few works of art pierce my soul the way this one does. It is a shattering, harrowing film that confronts the brutality of illness and death.

"To get born, your body makes a pact with death,
and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat—

You get into bed alone. Maybe you sleep, maybe you never wake up.
But for a long time you hear every sound.
It’s a night like any summer night; the dark never comes."

— Louise Glück, from "A Slip of Paper"