Yvette Parsons: Alien Mothers, Kiwi Weirdos and the Fine Art of Being Gloriously Peculiar
In Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant, Yvette Parsons steps into the deliciously dangerous role of Cynthia – an oversharing mother in a proudly strange New Zealand horror comedy where family dysfunction, body horror and extraterrestrial pregnancy collide.
Yvette Parsons has the marvellous gift of making the peculiar feel perfectly at home. She is one of those performers who can enter a scene with the faint air of someone who has overheard too much, said too much, and is about to make matters worse in the most entertaining possible way.
Across What We Do in the Shadows, Wellington Paranormal, Nude Tuesday, Educators, Shortland Street, Outrageous Fortune, Brokenwood Mysteries and The Power of the Dog, she has built a gallery of women who seem slightly off-centre and yet entirely recognisable. They are odd, yes, but lived-in odd. The best kind.
“The over-sharer. The over-talker. The blunt family member who cannot read the room – or simply chooses to set it on fire.”
In Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant, Parsons plays Cynthia, an oversharing mother in a comedy horror about a messy millennial underachiever who discovers she is pregnant with an extraterrestrial foetus. It is, one must admit, a premise of rare splendour: family dysfunction, body horror, bad decisions and outer space arriving together like uninvited guests at brunch.
For Parsons, the role made immediate sense. She knows these people, she says, because she has been watching them for decades. The over-sharer. The over-talker. The blunt family member who cannot read the room, or perhaps can read it perfectly and simply chooses to set it on fire.
Kiwi weirdness and the beautiful business of being odd
There is something very New Zealand about that. Our comedy has long had a gift for the deadpan, the awkward, the feral and the faintly supernatural. Parsons suggests this may be because New Zealanders feel fundamentally out of place. We are self-deprecating, awkward, and, in her wonderful phrase, “a culture built on a flatbed of imposter syndrome.”
No one knows exactly what they are doing or why. We have always been out here making it up as we go along.
“We’re scary weirdos,” she says.
Quite right. And thank heavens.
“New Zealand comedy has long had a gift for the deadpan, the awkward, the feral and the faintly supernatural.”
The film comes from Thunderlips – Sean Wallace and Jordan Mark Windsor – whose music-video background gives them an instinct for rhythm, image and visual mischief. Parsons describes working with them as a dream come true, calling them “twin flames of directorial and creative imaginative genius.”
One senses the set was not short of appetite, nerve or strange electricity.
A family story from outer space
There is family history here too, of the most deliciously peculiar sort. Parsons’ own mother once claimed to have seen an alien spaceship and aliens on Great Barrier Island while posted there as a nurse in the early 1950s. She kept the story up all her life.
Was it true? Was it a yarn? No one is quite sure. But what a gift for a daughter who would one day act in Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant.
Some families pass down recipes. Others pass down UFO sightings.
“Some families pass down recipes. Others pass down UFO sightings.”
Horror comedy, Sundance and the joy of risk
Horror comedy is a delicate little monster. Too much horror and the joke dies. Too much comedy and the danger evaporates. Parsons says the cast braided their instincts together each day. Not consciously, exactly.
“It’s actors’ magic,” she says. “No one knows what it is.”
That may be the most honest description of performance ever given.
What makes Parsons so compelling is that she does not play oddness as decoration. She looks for the thing underneath, the hook on which the whole strange coat can hang. A character, she says, becomes irresistible when the audience can love them – no matter what.
Even a monster can be loved if the performer finds the human pulse beneath the behaviour. She cites Tony Soprano, then says she wants to play one.
This is a marvellous ambition, and one hopes someone is taking notes.
“Horror comedy is a delicate little monster. Too much horror and the joke dies. Too much comedy and the danger evaporates.”
The film’s selection for Sundance gives this proudly strange New Zealand story an international stage, and Parsons is rightly proud: of Thunderlips, of producers Hot Candle Wave, and of a cast and crew who threw themselves behind a project that less imaginative people might have considered too risky.
She sees its success as proof that audiences are craving this kind of work – outrageous, genre-bending, and not shackled to the dead little machinery of formula.
Beneath the madness
But beneath the madness, Parsons is clear about what is at stake. The film may contain alien pregnancy, chaos and comedy, but underneath it sits something serious: the hell pregnancy can be, the cultural assumption of compulsory motherhood, informed consent, bodily autonomy, a woman’s right to choose, the right to refuse treatment, and the right to control one’s own body.
That is the cleverness of the thing. The film arrives wearing a ridiculous hat, then says something important while everyone is still laughing.
“The film arrives wearing a ridiculous hat, then says something important while everyone is still laughing.”
In my view, Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant understands that horror and comedy are not opposites. They are siblings. Both know the body is unreliable, families are dangerous, and life has a habit of turning up with news one is not prepared to receive.
Yvette Parsons, meanwhile, remains one of our finest interpreters of the beautifully strange.
She does not make oddness normal.
She reminds us normal was always odd to begin with.
Watch out for Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant – the proudly strange New Zealand horror comedy that took its alien pregnancy all the way to Sundance.
Roger Wyllie, View Mag