Messy, misanthropic, but with a marvellously malevolent mother

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This article was published 06/09/2024 (366 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The latest horror flick from the zeitgeisty A24 Studios is helmed by Max Eggers and Sam Eggers. The twin brothers are making their directorial debut, but they’ve worked before on productions by older brother Robert Eggers, the man behind The Witch and The Lighthouse.

Unfortunately, while the younger Eggerses have picked up some of the strangeness of those works, they have carried over none of the genius. The Front Room is a messy, misanthropic misfire, its one saving feature a singular performance by Kathryn Hunter as a malevolent mother figure.

Actor and singer Brandy Norwood (Cinderella, Descendants) plays Belinda, first seen lecturing to an anthropology class about symbols of the female across cultures. Women are often represented as wombs, she explains, and those wombs are often objectified and controlled.

Belinda might be thinking about wombs because she’s pregnant. She’s feeling fearful about impending motherhood — there are suggestions of past trauma — and there are already stresses in her life.

Belinda and her husband, Norman (Andrew Burnap), a public defender struggling with his workload, are drowning in debt, including the mortgage on their massive but mouldering house.

Belinda’s work and pay have been cut, even though she’s been told the university relies on “people like you.” (The speaker hastens to add she’s talking about untenured instructors, the workhorses of academia, but the possible racial implications of the phrase linger in the air.)

Just as the couple’s finances are stretched to the limit, Norman learns his estranged father is dead. At the funeral, they encounter his stepmother, Solange (Hunter). Heavily swathed in black veils, she’s tiny and seemingly frail, but it’s clear her will is indomitable.

Solange offers to help Belinda and Norman financially if they take her into their home. Norman initially resists: Solange’s punitively strict religious beliefs scarred his childhood. Belinda counters that people can change.

However, it soon becomes clear that Solange is not just nasty and demanding and dictatorial. She’s also an unrepentant racist. As Belinda experiences visions and nightmares and Solange’s power takes on seemingly supernatural dimensions, it looks as if the young couple have made a deal with the devil.

One can easily imagine this storyline being pitched to the studio as a cross between Get Out and Rosemary’s Baby. And the premise is promising, which is why it’s so frustrating that it’s squandered.

The filmmakers seem to be aiming for a camp combo of body horror and dark comedy, and you should expect explosions of mucus and urine and excrement and flatulence. While this graphic, scatological approach can be aggressively uncomfortable — it worked in The Lighthouse — here it’s neither scary nor particularly funny.

There’s some style to the film, including ominous production design and some interesting shots, but the substance is fatally weak. The script, adapted by the Eggers brothers from a story by Susan Hill (The Woman in Black), is abrupt, obvious and oddly tension-free, and the characters are flat and flimsy.

Poor Norman barely registers, but then he’s not really supposed to. This is a duel of opposing matriarchs, as they vie for Belinda’s unborn baby.

Norwood is doing what she can as Belinda, but her motivations remain arbitrary and unknowable. Hunter, on the other hand, dominates the film the way Solange dominates the house.

This is game performance that starts with some Southern gothic grotesquerie and then channels the extremes of the so-called “hagsploitation” genre, which includes movies such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

A theatre actor who played the brothel-keeper in Poor Things and the witches in The Tragedy of Macbeth, Hunter is only 66 but is playing much older. With her very physical work, she can suggest skin-and-bones vulnerability one moment and absolute monstrousness the next, and she gets some moments of sly humour.

Still, even this striking performance ends up stranded in an undeveloped narrative. Thematically, the Eggerses throw out references to structural racism, female bodily autonomy and America’s fraught history and possible futures. The threat of white Christian nationalism is explicitly brought up near the one-hour mark, but these ideas feel almost offensively obligatory. Nothing is followed through to become meaningful or interesting subtext.

Similarly, we could look at Belinda as an avatar of the new sandwich generation, dealing with precarious employment and an impossible housing market on top of caring for small children and aging relatives at the same time.

But Belinda’s difficult situation gets an overly literal representation in the overlap of infant diapers and adult diapers, which the Eggers brothers detail with a gleefully graphic montage.

There’s something real to say here, but instead we get a purposeless and unpleasant parody of the emotionally and physically challenging work of caregiving.

The Front Room is clearly aiming to be edgy, unclassifiable and very A24-ish, but in the end, it’s mostly confused and pointlessly mean.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca