Another day, another excellent debut feature, this time from writer-director Kate Dolan (who some may already be aware of thanks to her excellent 2017 short, Catcalls). You Are Not My Mother is exactly what the title tells you it is, a tale of suspicion and a fractured parent/child relationship. It also veers very closely to a certain classic modern horror from the 1990s in a final sequence that somehow feels like a great homage without suffering in comparison.
Hazel Doupe plays Charlotte, AKA Char, a young woman who is struggling with the ups and downs of her mother, Angela (Carolyn Bracken). After a major depressive episode, Angela goes missing. She turns up again a while later, but Char senses something different about her. As her mother's behaviour becomes even more inexplicable, Char also has to fend with more bullying from Kelly (Katie White) and some of her cohorts, but also manages to start forming a friendship with a girl named Suzanne (Jordanne Jones). Can Char find out what has happened to her mother? Perhaps information that her gran (Ingrid Craigie) is reticent to share could help get things back to normal.
Basing her story on a very traditional bit of supernatural lore, Dolan does a nice job of grounding potential horror in a mundane modern world. Char doesn't seem to exactly be living her best life, having a generally awful experience that many teenagers end up going through, and the change in her mother is all the worse for her because, well, she could really do with parental support while having a tough time of things. The fact that her attempt to find out just what has changed her mother leads to a revelation about her own past manages to make things creepier while also making it more relatable, in a way that so many of us have been told tales of our childhood we have no memory of, be they amusing moments or something with a hint of spookiness to it.
The cast all do very good work. Doupe is able to deliver her performance without overdoing her awkwardness or anger, it's a perfect portrayal of the kind of teen girl trying to keep to herself who becomes, for some unknown reason, a shining target for bullies. White is enjoyably nasty, always flanked by friends who won't stop her from going too far, and Jones excels as someone who provides a small ray of sunshine as things look to be getting darker and darker. Bracken has to act quite detached from everything around her, and she does well, while Craigie does enough to improve her role slightly, considering that her main purpose seems to be providing the important exposition required before the third act really kicks into gear.
This would pair nicely with a varied mix of movies from the past few years that have explored parent/child relationships within a supernatural/horror/fantastical context, even with something as strange as Lamb, but it also feels enjoyably fresh. Dolan delivers the horror goods here and there, but she's savvy enough to try giving viewers a glimpse of very real pain and sadness, the alienating feeling of being a teenager unable to relate to, or get support from, a parent. Sometimes horror is an enjoyable genre to explore because it takes us away from reality for a while. Sometimes horror is worth exploring because it IS reality, and knowing that monsters can inevitably be defeated makes it easier to cope with the times that the monsters had their fun at our expense.
8/10
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