All Yours (2026)
Every so often a short film takes a single, slightly mad idea and commits to it so completely that you cannot help but admire the nerve of the thing. Sophia Di Martino's All Yours is one of those, an eight-minute piece of domestic body horror that is grisly, funny and quietly pointed all at once. It does not quite tip over into something I would call essential, but it is a genuinely interesting little film, and a striking calling card. Three stars.
We open on a bored housewife in a home that is, not very subtly, coming apart around her. The ceiling paint is peeling, the wallpaper is peeling, and she is reduced to making conversation with a hardboiled egg, which tells you everything you need to know about the state of her days. There is an old English turn of phrase that ends with the words "I could rip my skin off," the thing you say when you are so hot, or so bored, or so fed up that your own body feels like a trap. All Yours takes that figure of speech and makes it horribly literal.
She tears her skin off. Not in a gory, muscle-and-blood sort of way, but something closer to a reptile shedding, a whole top layer peeled away to reveal fresh skin waiting underneath. And then, in the detail that makes the film, she gathers up the discarded skin and bakes it into little pastries to feed to her family. It is a grotesque image and a perfectly clear one: here is a woman who has been giving pieces of herself away for so long that she may as well serve them up on a plate. The read on it is hard to miss, and all the better for it, a sharp bit of commentary on how much of themselves mothers pour into raising a family, and how easily that devotion curdles into a numbing, self-erasing boredom.
What impressed me most was the execution. The peeling scene is the centrepiece, and it is genuinely gross, yet it is staged and realised so well that I kept thinking about the budget this must have been made on. For a short of clearly modest means, the effect lands with real confidence, never cheap, never tipping into the silly, and that control is a big part of why the metaphor works rather than collapsing into mere shock. Di Martino directs with a steady hand and a clear eye for the uncanny lurking in a tidy suburban kitchen.
If it stops short of greatness, it is mostly a matter of scale. The idea is strong and the single image is memorable, but at eight minutes the film states its metaphor and lets it sit rather than complicating or deepening it, so you leave admiring the concept more than feeling shaken by it. I wanted it to push one step further into the strangeness it conjures so well.
Three stars. All Yours is a smart, nasty, well-made little horror with a real idea at its centre and the craft to pull it off on next to nothing. As a piece of film-making it marks Di Martino out as a director worth watching, and as a wry scream about the quiet toll of motherhood it lingers longer than its eight minutes have any right to.
All Yours screens at the BFI London Film Festival as part of the Land of Hope and Gory shorts programme.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Driver (1978), Pride (2014), The Muppet Movie (1979)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More horror: The Influencer Project (2026), Child (2026), Leave Me Alone (2025)
