For all the horror movies that have been made about giving birth and early motherhood, there’s comparably few about end-of-life care. Yet if you’ve helped a loved one during their twilight years, you know that that work is just as humbling, arduous, and, occasionally, disgusting as bringing a kid into the world. Sam and Max Eggers, younger brothers to The Witch and The Lighthouse director Robert, capitalize on both experiences in their first film The Front Room, a thriller about a pregnant woman (Brandy Norwood) who urges her husband (Andrew Burnap) to take in his elderly, estranged stepmother (Kathryn Hunter). The film, while delightfully weird and powered almost exclusively by Hunter’s scenery-chewing, is ultimately so unhinged that it can’t hold onto any coherent story.
Let’s get this out of the way: A24 has incorrectly billed The Front Room as a religious horror movie. It’s not! Instead, expect a screwball domestic thriller hiding behind a curtain of crucifixes and ominous tent-revival talk – that is, if you must expect anything at all. Our protagonist, Belinda, is an academic specializing in anthropology, particularly ancient goddess imagery. Her husband, Norman, warns Belinda early on that his stepmother, Solange, is a Christian of the laying-on-of-hands, speaking-in-tongues variety. However, despite what the trailer might lead you to believe, those religious differences are more like set dressing than the film’s primary source of tension. What really drives Belinda and Solange apart is urine and feces.
That’s right, bodily fluids are so prominent in this film that they deserve their own paragraph. As a Black woman, Belinda is already wary of Solange, a certificate-bearing Daughter of the Confederacy. On top of this racist crap, dealing with Solange’s literal crap does not help matters. Whatever else may be said of Norwood’s performance, which isn’t terribly memorable, the ’90s chart-topper and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer star is brave enough to play out multiple dramatic scenes with fake poop on her face. And kudos to the art department for generating unprecedented volumes of prop pee.
The biggest hat tip of all goes to Hunter as Solange, who takes the assignment of “vengeful Evangelical granny” and produces camp genius. The willowy theater great, perhaps best known on-screen as Mrs. Figg in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix or the witches in The Tragedy of Macbeth, is just 67 years old, but she plays Solange as though she’s about 115. In one especially funny scene, she sings and speaks in tongues while praying over Belinda’s pregnant belly. (As I write this, the weird little tune she came up with is still stuck in my head.) If Norwood gets a gold star for dealing with weird special effects in this film then Hunter, who at one point straps on six false breasts, earns a gold medal.
If only The Front Room had the storytelling chops to support such a generous performance. None of these gonzo elements really go anywhere, which makes the film’s bigger swings – like Solange delivering a vengeful fart – land as crass. Even the mundane stuff, like Belinda and Norman’s marriage, gets muddled. Belinda guilts Norman into letting Solange move in with them, despite Norman talking about how Solange abused him as a child, so it’s hard to feel bad for her when Solange turns out to be a subpar house guest. Belinda impulsively quits her job – while pregnant! – early on in the film, then gets upset with Norman for diving into his work and leaving her to tend to Solange.
There’s not enough time for The Front Room to deal with those messy domestic dramas. It already struggles mightily to stay on-message with its meatiest themes: toxic motherhood and the indignity of aging. This could primarily be a film about an older white woman trying to wrest child rearing duties from a new Black mother. There’s plenty to get into there! Sadly, The Front Room is too distracted by excrement, other family dynamics, and Christian imagery to really deliver.
