SYNOPSIS

ÉVA, a woman in her 40s, suffers from the feeling of being insignificant. She is an unhappy mother and wife. Éva knows her husband has an affair, but she is never brave enough to discuss it. However, she hates her cowardice more than the fact that she is cheated on. As a hairdresser, she started to hate her job and every segment of the beauty industry. Mainly because she always felt that she couldn’t meet the expectations of this world, and she never saw herself as beautiful. Éva suppresses all her desires and emotions, which even contaminates her relationship with the most important person in her life, her daughter. She has been living in these unsolved inner conflicts for years. One day Éva finds a monster mask in a hidden box in their home. She tries it on without any distinct reason. But when she looks in the mirror, she sees that this miserable, rough-skinned face expresses how she feels inside. Somehow it reflects how all the compromises she had made ruined her life, and she thinks this is what she had become over the years. However, it is not scary for her. It feels liberating. Initially, she just goes for a short walk in the neighbourhood with the mask on her head, but later these walks turn into long strolls around the streets of Budapest. She enjoys that her environment is finally noticing her. She loves to provoke them with the mask. Éva feels she never wants to remove this mask and starts rebelling against the world like this. During her stroll in the city, Éva discovers a gay bar, where she finds a welcoming community in the world of drag shows. Under the name of Monster Lady, she starts singing in the bar and experiences the liberty of young adulthood, which she never experienced before. As a monster, she builds up a new identity, which teaches her to love herself again after long years of depression. Éva’s family is suffering from the mother’s absence. Her teenage daughter, VIKI, can’t rely on her parents. She escapes from her loneliness into an unfulfilled platonic love with a 30-year-old rocker guy from the neighbour. Viki has to take care of her father, who is always drunk. The man realises he fell in love with his unreachable monster wife again, but Éva rejects all his approaches. Her daughter feels that everything is falling apart around her. Finally, she decides to bring Éva home. When Viki finds her mom in the drag bar, she makes Éva face her former self. Éva hated herself because she was too much of a coward to rebel, but now she was brave enough to shout out to the world, I’m here. Her daughter wants the same, to be noticed, but not by the whole world, only by her mother. Éva has to decide what to choose.