Bloody Mess is a charming and darkly witty short film written, directed, produced, and animated by Megan Wennberg, and is based on the true story of Wennberg’s battle with fibroids. When her periods suddenly went haywire, she was forced to confront the beast that is the modern medical system, and think about what exactly she wanted out of life.

Although the events in the film are gruesome, it comes across more like a children’s fairy tale than a medical drama with its stopmotion animation and delightful practical effects, such as red stage curtains, a talking uterus made out of a bra, and a fibroid fashioned out of a hissing ball of yarn.

The star of the show is undoubtedly Wennberg’s uterus. Voiced by Canadian actress Susan Kent, Wennberg’s uterus is a fabulous prima donna who knows exactly what she wants and isn’t afraid to tell everyone about it. How could she be anything else with her hot pink bra cups, lipsticked mouth, and bejeweled ovaries?

While it delivers on entertainment value, Bloody Mess is educational as well. Fibroids are noncancerous growths in the uterus. They are usually asymptomatic, but for many they can cause pelvic and back pain, frequent urination, and—like in Wennberg’s case—heavy periods.

The cause of fibroids is not yet fully known despite them afflicting 70% to 80% of people with uteruses by the age of 50. “Bullshit!” Wennberg’s uterus cries. “Imagine [if] they happened to balls.”

I don’t have fibroids myself, but like Wennberg, I, too, have abnormally heavy, painful periods that leave me weakened and anemic for weeks afterwards. It is difficult to explain to people who don’t get periods, and sometimes even more difficult to explain to people who do, what having heavy periods is like.

Heavy periods are humiliating, inconvenient, and strangely existential. Nothing reminds you of your mortality like watching a torrent of your own blood go down the shower drain à la Alfred Hitchcock.

The only thing worse than heavy, painful periods is trying to fix heavy, painful periods. A path towards recovery, or at the very least management, is rife with internal probes, allusions to surgery, NSAIDs, ultrasounds, blood work, iron infusions, and doctors reconsidering their stance on teenage pregnancy.

Bloody Mess portrays the two steps forward, one step back approach that is unavoidable when dealing with both heavy periods and the medical system. If there’s one thing you learn from period problems it’s how to laugh at your own pain, and Bloody Mess has the audience laughing along.

Few subjects are as taboo as periods. They are even more so reviled if the flow is unable to be contained by a regular pad or tampon, or if one is unable to do a pirouette while menstruating, or really anything at all other than lie in bed curled around a hot water bottle.

It is possible that the gratuitous amounts of fake blood, graphic descriptions of surgical errors, and bloody tampons swimming across the screen might offend some viewers, but for those of us like Wennberg whose uteruses refuse to behave on a monthly basis, we finally get the chance to cry “See what we have to deal with!?”