Among the great themes of this edition of the Turin Film Festival, one of the most recurring is certainly represented by motherhood, that magical and symbiotic relationship that inextricably binds a woman to the little creature born from her body, women in the process of becoming one, women which by becoming so completely change thought and form, even widening voids that are in themselves unbridgeable.
Iris Kaltenbäck's debut here tells of her morbid desire and therefore her frustrated denial.
Lydia is an excellent midwife, she takes care of mothers more than their children, as she points out on several occasions, yet she would really like to become a mother herself and thus take care of her child (love him and be loved) . On the day Lydia discovers that she is being cheated on by her boyfriend, her best friend Salomé, her "communicating vessel", with whom she shares a single dose of happiness, reveals that she is pregnant. Everything changes from that moment. Desire becomes obsession, motherhood becomes possession, the only possibility to escape the insomnia of directionless lives, like Milos, the bus driver that Lydia meets in one night, in an unrecognizable urban Paris which, like the anthropomorphic metropolis of < 3>Robot Dreams cancels bodies and dreams in extreme solitude, in "familiar strangers", including wandering stateless of happiness simply from one shift to the next.

With a delicate and elegant occasionally accompanied by a voice-over by Milos that is at times too invasive, Le Ravissement entrusts everything to its magnificent actress always wrapped in her warm red coat, the magnetic Hafsia Herzi of Cous cous< 4> by Abdellatif Kechiche, to her visceral need to host and give life, exhausting herself in her face, body and breathing like her friend's pelvic muscles, atrophic and incontinent for having been taken to the extreme precisely at Lydia's hands in a the birth was unnecessarily painful (“I didn't want to disappoint her”). A Dardenne thriller in some ways, because behind wanting to be a mother there is the greatest secret of that life that has yet to be born. And while the lies accumulate, Lydia begins to write the non-existent story of her motherhood, persisting at all costs in furnishing a de facto invented life, built on selfish, manipulated and manipulative trust.
Lydia brought hundreds of children into the world, yet none. The greatest fault, the most intimate madness: not being a mother. And start again from there.

From Il Buio In Sala - Report of the 41st Torino Film Festival (2023)