Scrambled (2024), by Leah McKendrick
To be a mother is a choice that should be made very carefully — which is not always the case. To decide if, first and foremost, and then when to have children is one key decision every person should make after a lot of thinking. The part of “when”, nowadays, has been very stretched out, thanks to science allowing for women aged forty and older to have children. One such tool for older women to have children is freezing their eggs when they’re still “fresh”. It’s this truly life-changing decision that the lead of the movie “Scrambled” makes — and then she is met with the consequences.
It is at her friend Sheila’s wedding reception that Nellie (Leah McKendrick) receives a rather intense lecture on why she should freeze her eggs to get pregnant later in life. Seeing a doctor right after this talk, Nellie finds out that she has “diminished ovarian reserve”. She suffers pressure from her father to have kids and, while navigating the difficulties of funding the fertility treatment, she receives comments from her friends that are not encouraging at all.
When she gets the funds from her brother, Nellie starts another quest: to find out if any of her former boyfriends could be a suitable husband and father for her kids. To make things worse, she receives the news that her ex-boyfriend is going to be a father. And, in the most unlikely way, Nellie finds solace and support in a group for pregnancy loss.
Nellie’s mother is an immigrant from an unspecified part of Latin America. She learned English, moved to the USA, got to college, married and had children before thirty, so Nellie, at age 34, compares with her mom and sees herself in disadvantage. However, we never learn about Nellie’s mother’s feelings and thoughts about her daughter freezing her eggs — Nellie’s relationship with her father is explored instead. But views on pregnancy and childrearing from the point of views of Catholic Latins have been explored on media before, more notably at the CW’s series “Jane the Virgin”.
Nellie says that “Your thirties are just your twenties with money”. Her wisdom goes further: she compares being a woman with being an avocado: “you’re ripe for one second then you are old and geriatric”. The avocado becomes symbolic in Nellie’s journey from then on.
Sheila (Ego Nwodim) tells Nellie that freezing her eggs is “buying time”. Nellie says, in the group therapy, that creating life is a quasi-mystical form of team work, but she never felt so alone in her life, while going through the process of freezing her eggs. She might be a sexually empowered woman, but she still wants someone to — both literally and figuratively — hold her hand in times of difficulty.
“Scrambled” was written and directed by Leah McKendrick, who also plays the lead role. Born in San Francisco, she has Scottish, Irish and Nicaraguan heritage and appeared, in 2023, in another movie where her character freezes her eggs: “Baby Steps”. Leah chose to make this movie after opportunities as screenwriter diminished for her — she decided to draw from her own experience of loneliness while freezing her eggs to destigmatize the process and make a movie that may not be a baby, but it’s a milestone worth sharing with the world.
As a IMDb reviewer said, Nellie’s journey may resonate with only part of the audience, but we all can have fun with “Scrambled”. We all root for Nellie after only a few minutes of screen time has passed, and her journey of self-empowerment and finding sisterhood is a joy to watch.
