Pieces of a Woman: the real grief that inspired a must-see Netflix drama

When Kata Wéber showed Kornél Mundruczó the first draft of the script that would become Pieces of a Woman – a quietly devastating drama of loss and parenthood, coming to Netflix next week – he doubted that he was the right person to direct it.

“The story is told so much from the female perspective that in that first reading [I encountered] some ideas that were shockingly new to me,” said the 45-year-old director, when I spoke to him and Wéber over Zoom from Hungary.

His grizzled and gruff exterior belies the kind of good humour that not even the frigidity of Zoom can dispel, but his point is serious: he had never really acknowledged the extent of the physical bond between a mother and baby before reading Wéber’s script. That realisation was deeply personal to them both. Pieces of a Woman, about a couple who lose their first child during a traumatic home birth, was based on the pair’s own bereavement – they are a real-life couple, as well as creative partners.

A few years ago they lost a child through miscarriage (at an earlier stage in the pregnancy than their fictionalised counterparts). Grieving their loss openly, they tell me, felt like a taboo.

“We just didn’t talk about it,” says Mundruczó. “And then later on I unexpectedly read a few fragments from Kata’s notebook [depicting an argument between a mother and daughter over the right way to grieve the loss of a child] under the title ‘Pieces of a Woman’ and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, how deep did you push this down?’”

“I didn’t know I was grieving,” agrees Wéber, 40, looking out at me serenely beneath masses of honey-coloured hair, “so writing was like therapy. You begin to understand your own feelings.”

Those feelings are the basis of the physical grief Mundruczó encountered in her script. On one level, the second half of the film is the story of a woman’s body trying to cope with the disappearance of the child it is primed to nurture.

But before that comes the movie’s most astonishing section: a 22-minute birth scene, in which its star, Vanessa Kirby – best known for playing the younger Princess Margaret in the first two series of The Crown – conjures the mother, Martha’s, experience with a realism it is hard to watch. Shia LaBeouf plays her supportive partner Sean: full of bearlike love throughout, but unable to save the day.

For Mundruczó, catharsis came in the filming of this scene, which was made with a single unflinching shot. “It was really difficult to find a form for it. As a father of three” – he and Wéber have a daughter together, and Mundruczó has two children from a previous relationship – “I was aware of what this moment means, how it’s as close to this kind of godlike, spiritual moment as a human being can get. I wanted to show the variety of emotions you go through, but not make it too romantic or too painful.”

In the end, he decided to plan it like an action sequence. “We divided it into chapters, we had 34 in 22 minutes, we counted, remember Kata?” he chuckles, amused at his own obsessiveness. “It was like: here’s the joke, here’s this feeling, here’s that feeling …”

The shot was captured using a gimbal, a pivoted mount that gives the same fluid effect as a hand-held camera without the shakiness. The result is at once immersive and disorienting, the point of view swinging between characters and across rooms, as the drama of the birth unfolds. In the relentlessness of the single shot, which seems to catch every one of Martha’s agonised cries, time stretches. As Mundruczó says, “No one asked me, ‘Oh, that was 22 minutes, but shouldn’t it have been 16 hours?’ ”

Wéber is quick to point to the many different women whose myriad experiences inspired the story, as well as its creators’ own. Perhaps the most significant was the case of a midwife, ágnes Geréb, prosecuted for negligence after a baby died during a home birth – the film too features a flustered, perhaps fatally incompetent midwife. Geréb’s trial, which was highly publicised, was taking place in Hungary as Wéber was writing. Both Wéber and Mundruczó attended the trial and interviewed her on several occasions. “To me, she’s not the villain,” says Wéber. “In the middle of the trial the mother stood up and said ‘This midwife did everything possible for my daughter, and therefore, I cannot blame her.’”

The story is also built on a bedrock of tragic European history. Martha’s mother Elizabeth – a cold, furious performance from Ellen Burstyn – is a Holocaust survivor who cannot understand why her daughter isn’t interested in seeking justice for her loss. The storyline was inspired by Wéber’s own family background: “It’s an environment where survival is the biggest issue, and bringing children into this world is the ultimate way to survive… it means you get families with this kind of perfectionist attitude and this kind of strong female character.”

Is the conflict between Martha and Elizabeth inspired by conversations she has had with her own mother? “I never had that discussion, no, but I do remember very well that my mother said: ‘The more children you bring into this world, the better it will be for you.’ ”

Pieces of a Woman is Mundruczó’s first English language film. A seasoned theatre and filmmaker in his own country, perhaps his most high-profile feature hitherto has been White God, the tale of a bond between a child and her dog that spins into an other-worldly revenge parable, and won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2014.

Despite the language switch, Mundruczó and Wéber were keen to keep a flavour of Eastern Europe in their new movie, locating it in Boston.

“It’s the most Eastern European city in America,” Mundruczó chuckles. “We needed somewhere that was liberal and conservative at the same time, Jewish and Christian, and full of class clashes, and our American producers said ‘Oh yes, that’s Boston.’ ”

Thanks in part to its international reach, the film has already been a hit with critics. It launched to acclaim at the Venice Film Festival in September, winning the best actress Volpi cup for Kirby.

The praise has come as something of a surprise to Mundruczó – “it’s not sexy to make an emotional movie today,” he says ruefully.

So are the pair cherishing secret dreams of Oscar glory? They roll their eyes good-humouredly.

“Where we come from, art is not a race,” says Mundruczó. “But at the same time the market needs [awards races] and we’re more than happy to be visible. The major thing is to tell this story, to break the silence and crush the taboo.”

Pieces of a Woman is on Netflix from January 7