brilliant

Coloring is therapeutic - I love this series so much it's been one of my favorite mangas for years

i've seen people (understandably imo) bothered by the fact that the mother was a "monster" when she was a victim who was the product of decades of rape and incest, but i'm willing to lightly defend this on thematic grounds.

a significant chunk of the movie's theme seems to be rooted in the idea that our perception of who is really bad and good is stilted and often informed by our own cultural biases. take, for example, how tess runs away from andre the first time she sees him bc he's a homeless man and calls the cops -- he was trying to save her life. the cops, often portrayed as heroes in our culture, are totally useless and even callous and cruel. to a lesser extent, keith -- a guy who the audience is acquainted with as a chronic horror villain through his actor -- comes off creepy and suspicious but was ultimately genuine, kind and innocent. arguably the strongest example is frank, who is brutalizing innocent women by the dozens and buying supplies and skulking around in public, and all the while his neighbors whisper to him in confidence that they need to get out and move because the neighborhood is falling apart -- because it's losing its racial homogeneity.

and just the same, the mother LOOKS "scary" but she's just a victim trying to do what she thinks it's right. the REAL monster is frank, who is ostensibly a "normal" guy. the mother is, along with tess and andre, one of the most innocent characters in the film. this sounds ridiculous considering the amount of carnage she inflicts, but unlike frank, her motivations are pure: she sees tess as her baby, and she wants to do anything to protect her. even after tess rams her with the car, she throws herself off the water tower to save her life. tess understands this. it's why she hesitates in the end, because she's a good person and (unlike AJ) sees the mother for what she really is -- even after everything she's been through.

while a lot of the movie is about the ramifications of violence, i'd argue it's also about judging things based on our society's prejudices. the mother as a monster is a red herring. frank, though he looks "normal," is the true beast, not her.

The real conflict of the movie was about pitting her self preservation instincts against her empathy, and it's specifically in a gendered way (I'm sure there are racial aspects as well, but I haven't finished rotating those in my brain yet). When she forgoes self preservation in her attempts to help Keith and AJ, it definitively comes back to bite her in the ass, leading to her capture in the former instance and her near re-capture and severe wounds in the latter. However it is notably her empathy/her ability to read the Mother that allows her to survive as well as she does.

This theme is repeated in the third act twist, where the well meaning retail employee helps Frank prepare for a birth, and unwittingly assists in the prolonged torture of one of his victims.

Paired with the number of times in the film that men refuse to take women's concerns seriously (Keith with the room, AJ denying his rape accusations when it's very clear he did something wrong, the cops refusing to believe Tess, the homeless man who insists that Tess leave AJ behind, etc) I think the film manages to say something interesting, if not very subtle, about the gendered nature of care in society.