Vague Visages’ The Young Mother’s Home review contains minor spoilers. Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne’s 2025 movie features Babette Verbeek, Elsa Houben and Janaina Halloy. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

The prospect of a movie by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne titled The Young Mother’s Home could trigger anxiety before you’ve even seen a single frame, as the Belgian siblings are no strangers to putting children in peril in their thriller-inflected brand of social realist cinema. From a baby being kidnapped and sold on the black market in L’Enfant (2005) to a tween searching for a sibling held captive by drug lords in Tori and Lokita (2022), the Dardenne brothers are as unsparing in bringing their stories to life as they are empathetic to their plights. The prospect of an ensemble drama following several teenage moms could raise eyebrows,  just at the thought of how the siblings will find new ways to put their young protagonists through the ringer and leave helpless infants in danger.

While The Young Mother’s Home isn’t a departure for the Dardenne brothers, the film strays from invoking the ticking-clock template of a thriller, leaving just the heartfelt character studies beneath that framework. This isn’t to say that the characters don’t have to contend with major obstacles — addiction, adoption and economic instability are among the unwelcome intruders in these characters’ lives — but these individual obstacles are never invoked in a way that makes any of the girls look unfit to be a parent. Quite refreshingly, all of them show responsibility towards their children — which contradicts the negative stereotypes about teenage moms. Even as they’re considering adoption or trying to find long-lost family members despite being warned against it, the protagonists’ actions always align with the babies’ best interests.

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Set in the Belgian city of Liège, The Young Mother’s Home first introduces Jessica (Babette Verbeek), who is in the later stages of pregnancy and trying to track down the mother who put her up for adoption just after she was born, looking for closure on one chapter of her life before she starts the next. The parents of the baby’s father tried to pay Jessica off to take an abortion, which she refused to do, not out of a pro-life stance but a seeming need to break the cycle and prove herself worthy of a family of her own. This contradicts directly with the slightly older Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan), who has recently given birth and is looking for foster parents against the wishes of her own mother, a recovering addict who has had a string of abusive relationships. Ariane also wants to break the generational cycle she’s seemingly fallen into, as painful as it is to give away a baby she’s begun to bond with. The young woman originally planned to have an abortion, but her overbearing mom talked her out of it.

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These two storylines are most interesting to pair together not just because of how they contrast in complementing ways, but in how they complicate the simplistic reading that cynical viewers will undoubtedly have about The Young Mother’s Home being a “pro-life” film. Aside from the fact that it’s a motherhood-centric film, the stories are set within a system which allows for pregnant people to choose whether or not to give birth — a care network that is there to help impoverished or unhoused parents raise their kids if they don’t have the means closer to home. One could argue that this alone makes The Young Mother’s Home the Dardennes’ most optimistic film to date, even if it’s just via glimpsing some success stories from elsewhere in the titular home (such as a teen who has just received news she’s been accepted on a course to train for her dream job), showing how this can be a life raft without ever sugarcoating the long path to getting there. The four case studies can be as bleak as audiences have come to expect from their films, but this is counteracted by a wider sense of community that is often absent. There’s a sense of a system designed to help these characters through the toughest of times, and the film never becomes a saccharine love letter to that system or an overly sentimental story about the power of women showing solidarity with each other.

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In fact, the directors typically refrain from having their characters cross over too much, even as the protagonists all live under the same roof. The story of Julie (Elsa Houben) is one of the more self-contained tales in The Young Mother’s Home, her devotion to her boyfriend and their baby challenged by going cold turkey, at times even struggling to leave the home out of a fear she isn’t strong enough not to use again. The Dardennes are no strangers to melodramatics, even within their grounded realist tales, but they create some of the most devastating moments in their filmography during their latest drama by downplaying the biggest beats. Julie’s boyfriend showing up at the home and discovering she’s just been admitted to a hospital is powerful because it reduces its seismic impact to a whisper, out of the fear of waking up the baby. Similarly, Ariane meeting with potential foster parents and asking them to teach her baby to play an instrument is heartbreaking because of the resting baby present. It’s a simple narrative device which ensures no moment can be overplayed to the point of melodrama; it feels real because of the dramatic restraints placed upon it. While viewing The Young Mother’s Home, I often felt like it was a further inch closer — following Tori and Lokita — to a full-blown return-to-form without ever quite getting there. In retrospect, if pulling off several emotional haymakers like this doesn’t represent filmmakers at the peak of their powers, then what does?

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The final mother is Perla (Lucie Laruelle), who has been impatiently waiting for her baby’s father to get out of juvie and settle down with her — something he couldn’t be less invested in. A recurring theme around these stories is getting absent fathers to just recognize their own kids, let alone be a part of their lives, and the Dardennes are fairly even-handed in refusing to demonize the teenage boys making the lives of these girls harder. The young male characters may not be nice people, but they are still, well, children, and their actions are a world away from the malicious scheme concocted by Jérémie Renier’s dirtbag boyfriend in L’Enfant. In extending empathy towards teenage mothers others would be quick to write off, showing a glimmer of hope in their futures, the directors similarly refuse to rush towards judging anybody in this world. Even those harshest towards the protagonists have internalized, easy-to-understand justifications.

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After a few missteps since Two Days, One Night (2014) became an unlikely crossover success, the Dardennes brothers are back on track with The Young Mother’s Home. It’s their simplest, most open hearted work to date, and it’s one of their most resonant tales because of that straightforwardness.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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