Critics Campus 2026 participant Guy Webster speaks to directorial duo THUNDERLIPS about medical misogyny, genre tropes, and finding the right balance between comedy and body horror in their outrageous feature directorial debut.

Mary (Hannah Lynch) is a prototypical listless millennial living at home with her mother, Cynthia (Yvette Parsons). When she’s not inhaling ice cream–covered chips or getting interrupted in the middle of a Hentai-induced wank, she’s having close encounters of the third kind at the laundromat. After a few drops of acidic alien spunk from a peculiarly endowed neighbour lead Mary to the local hospital with a pulsating baby bump, doctors don’t believe her and ultimately fail to assist, which leaves her only one option: to get creative and help herself.

Aotearoa-based filmmaking duo Sean Wallace and Jordan Mark Windsor – aka THUNDERLIPS – didn’t set out to make a horror-comedy when they started working on their feature-length debut, Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant. But their part–science fiction, part–body horror satire strikes the perfect balance between gruesome practical effects and a brand of absurdist deadpan humour respectively reminiscent of Peter Jackson’s early works and Flight of the Conchords. The result is a surprisingly heartfelt portrait of the horrors of medical misogyny, grounded in the relationship between one overbearing mother, one idle daughter and one unwanted extraterrestrial.

After premiering the film at Sundance and picking up the New Flesh Award for Best First Feature at Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, Wallace and Windsor return to the Southern Hemisphere ahead of the film’s New Zealand theatrical release in September.

You’ve been navigating the festival circuit for Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant since its world premiere at Sundance earlier this year. How has the audience reception differed between festivals?

Sean Wallace: So far, the Australian audience has been my favourite. The screening in Sydney has been the best screening of the entire run. They got the humour. They got [many] more of the jokes than the Americans and the Canadians. But also, they’re not as squeamish or conservative as the New Zealanders. They’re just like: We’re here for this disgusting, fucked-up movie, and let’s just have fun with it and laugh our arses off.

Do you think it has anything to do with the film’s deadpan humour, which is so recognisable to us now as a uniquely New Zealand style?

Jordan Mark Windsor: I would say that, for us, the deadpan was an incredible weapon because we found we were making a movie about how doctors ignore women. They’re so dismissive, and that just paired like a fine wine … We just realised it was so funny to have people not believe you that you’re pregnant with an alien.

We saw this beautiful tradition of New Zealand supernatural stuff, like What We Do in the Shadows [2014], Braindead [1992] and Wellington Paranormal, and we were like, “Oh, there’s this deadpan-in-the-face-of-the-supernatural thing that is really joyful.” And it [reflects] how doctors ignore women all over the world. So we had this opportunity to capture that natural sensibility and harness it for this joke, but also this horror. It’s like horror and comedy at the same time.

I read in a previous interview that you approached the film as if it were a kitchen-sink drama initially. Why did you find that more helpful as a way in to nailing this balance between horror and comedy?

SW: Well, we never said the word comedy, really, in the making of it. We went to [South] Korea and we saw this really haunting horror movie – it was an Austrian film, The Devil’s Bath [2024]. We watched that, and then we were like, “Oh, this film was so affecting.” We left Korea to come back to make our movie almost straightaway, and we were like, “Fuck, we gotta make this more of a horror.” Because we both knew that the script was funny – the lines were funny [and] Jordan’s dialogue is so fucking good and so witty, but also so to-the-point. To me, the balance comes out of letting the character make their own decisions.

JMW: I remember our very first day of shooting: we were shitting ourselves, because we really didn’t know how we were going to manage to balance the horror and the comedy in the same scenes. I think it works because we were never aiming it [to be] a comedy. Mary is not in a comedy, but the other characters are. I think that’s part of how it works – it’s her movie, and the funny stuff is peripheral, almost.

That’s exactly the impression that I got watching Mary’s storyline, and thinking: I wish she were allowed to be in a straight body horror movie, because what she is going through is genuinely horrific.

JMW: I think there’s one other thing to say: that cinema does violence through looking – because of the gaze of the lens, you know? But we didn’t ever want our gaze to be horrible to [Mary]. I think that’s part of the secret sauce that you were responding to: this whole movie’s about this stuff, but it isn’t laughing at her. And it’s because the movie doesn’t objectify her – it doesn’t leer at her body, because she doesn’t look at herself that way, you know? It was just very important that the movie sides with her.

Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant

Beyond Hannah Lynch’s stellar lead performance, the film also features an incredible ensemble cast. Do you think of it as an ensemble film?

SW: It was such a joyful experience to cast the movie. They all bring such unique personalities and vibes. And when you sort of put them all together, you have this crazy ensemble. There was a different ending to the movie originally where they all came back as a cult, and you saw them all together – all these ridiculous personalities and incredible actors all together in the same room. But yeah, I think this film really lives and dies on its performances, with Hannah being the linchpin of that.

I know that you used three different lenses while filming. What was the rationale behind that? Was it narrative-driven, or more to do with characterisation?

JMW: There was this thing when we were making the movie – we were like, “We don’t want to give away how crazy it’s going to get.” When this movie starts, like you mentioned, it’s a kitchen-sink drama. We wanted it to be like: “How great and how crazy if you’re in a kitchen-sink drama and aliens show up.”

So we started off on spherical lenses, on ARRI Master Primes. They are just super clean, super real. But from the beginning of the laundry scene, we’ve subtly gone from spherical lenses to these Cooke lenses that are semi-anamorphic. When people say “anamorphic”, they’re usually talking about 2x anamorphic: that is, it doubles the width of the frame. These were 1.5x as opposed to 2x anamorphic, so the anamorphic qualities are minimised, [which means it] doesn’t have any lens flares – those big blue streaky lens flares that we associate with sci-fi-like Spielberg movies or even J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek movies.

In the middle section, almost the majority of the movie is on those Cookes. And then, when the character gets hit by lightning, from that point we’re on 2x anamorphic lenses that have a big streaky lens flare in them. By that time, you’re in these scenes with the alien nest and everyone’s got flashlights, and it feels like … When did this become a sci-fi movie? We wanted to just sneak you in so you couldn’t see the transition points.

As you’ve said, the movie’s interested in Mary’s lack of agency and her being subject to these systems that don’t believe her. What was your way into understanding that dynamic while writing the script?

JMW: I became a father. Well, she’s nine now, so it was a while ago. Part of that experience as an outsider, as a man, made it extra shocking to see the way my child’s mother was ignored – by doctors especially – and just feeling like, Hey, they wouldn’t talk that way to me.

Then, also, when you hold a baby, people come up to you in the street or in the supermarket and start telling you their own birth story (not right away, but if they can see that you’re interested, which I am; I love birth stories), and everyone’s birth story is horrifying and hilarious. So, in a way, this movie is our meagre contribution to a genre of conversation that has been happening forever.

Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant screened as part of the MIFF 2026 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.