There have been many horror movies showing all the possible horrors of giving birth or motherhood, but comparatively little has been done when it comes to end of life care. But if you have ever taken care of an elderly family member in their last days, you know that this work is equally rewarding, challenging, and sometimes repulsive, just like bringing out a child. Robert Eggers’ younger brothers Max and Sam, co-writers of The Witch and The Lighthouse, attracted the positive and negative sides of both experiences in their debut film The Front Room where a pregnant woman played by Brandy Norwood persuades Andrew Burnap’s character to bring in his elderly estranged stepmother Kathryn Hunter. Although the story is more disturbing than incomprehensible and almost entirely driven by Hunter’s excessive performance, the film gets zanier to a point where it can no longer keep a narrative.
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 the study of anthropology with a focus on ancient goddess imagery. Her husband Norman, early on, cautions Belinda that his stepmother Solange is a Christian of the hot hands and tongue speaking people. However, although this is what the trailer may seek to lead you to believe, those religious differences are more like used tires and cosmetics in a movie that is not primarily about religion. Pure domination of Belinda and Solange comes from urine and feces separation.
It is true that there is enough of bodily fluids in this film that it even requires some explanation in a separate paragraph. Because she is a Black woman, Belinda is already cautious of Solange, a certificate-wielding Daughter of the Confederacy. Along with this racist crap, confrontation with Solange’s actual excrement does not make things better. Whatever else can be said of Norwood’s performance, which isn’t terribly memorable anyway, the chart-busting ’90s brat and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer star is bold enough to perform a number of tense sequences with phony poop smeared over her face. And art department deserves a round of applause for creating unimaginable amounts of prop pee.
The final gratuity goes to Hunter as Solange, who relishes the passion of ‘vengeful Evangelical granny’ with a camp genius. That slender theatrical diva who’s more recognized on screen as Mrs Figg in Helen McRory – Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix, or as witches in The Tragedy Of Macbeth over 67 years only, plays Solange like a woman 115 years old. One particularly amusing moment involves her singing and speaking in tongues as she performs a prayer over the pregnant Belinda’s belly. (As I write, this maddening little song she made up is still rattling around in my mind). If Norwood’s heroic challenges the other characters in the film focusing on the strange special effects earned him a gold star, then the one who puts on six fake breasts, Hunter, gets awarded a gold medal.
If only The Front Room had the narrative prowess to bear such an undeserving performance. None of these gonzo elements really go anywhere, which means that the bulky swings of the film – such as Solange generating an exasperated fart of vengeance – read crass. Even the prosaic things like Belinda and Norman and their marriage, there is a jumble. Both of them want to punishasacbiotic idiot Boykin and hit it twice with a shovel – that turning out beholding Norman as a protagonist left some disappointments. Belinda hastily makes the life changing decision to resign from her employment – when she is pregnant! – quite a number of minutes at the early part of the film, then gets irritated by Norman for throwing himself into work and leaving Solange to her.
The Front Room has no such luxury when it comes to housewife issues and that is part of the threads. It even already has a hard time sticking to the central troubling issues of mothers and their bad relationships with their children, and the comfortable inequalities of time and culture respectively of a woman’s beauty. This could for the most part be a story of an older white woman competing for the role of taking care of her child with a younger African – American woman. That is an enormous amount of matters to find out there! Unfortunately, The Front Room is further too busy being preoccupied with filth, other family relationships, and hypocritical religion to actually achieve anything.
Resolution
The narrative that the Front Room is some form of a horror flick revolving around Brandy, the singer-n-actress, is misplaced. It is akin to a screwball domestic thriller with overtones of Kathryn Hunter, the theater-trained actress. That ambiguity runs through the story itself: What is the subject of this film – religion, motherhood, education, age, race, or the distribution of housework within the sexes. It beats me, but I know there is plenty of poop and pee.
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