You Are Not My Mother (2021)

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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The Dead (1987)

Based on the short story by James Joyce, the final tale in "Dubliners", The Dead is a handsome and well-acted movie that nevertheless just left me cold. It's also the final film to have been directed by the great John Huston (the story was adapted into screenplay form by his son, Tony).

The plot is all about a Christmas dinner being held by a couple of old spinsters (Cathleen Delany and Helena Carroll). The ladies have invited a mixture of friends and family and everyone gets a chance to make an impression on the crowd, be it with a rendition of poetry or song or a loud debate during the main meal. Two guests in particular, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy (played, respectively, by Donal McCann and Anjelica Huston), find that the evening gives them plenty to think about, cause to reflect on their lives and wonder about past events that led them to become their present selves.

I'm actually explaining the film very badly, and misrepresenting it somewhat, so I can only apologise to those who have already seen the movie and who may be wondering if I even watched the damn thing. I did watch it, I enjoyed it, but it's a very difficult film to pin down, in my opinion. It's the film equivalent of a cloud of damp mist that seems to move through your pores when you walk through it.

I'm not even sure why I didn't like it more than I did. The script was a great mix of lively chat and sombre introspection, with a couple of pieces of very beautiful poetry in there too, and the direction from Huston (who was very near the end of his life and, sadly, died before the film was released) is solid and keeps the naturalistic performances and material always watchable. The cast is pretty flawless. McCann and Huston are very good in their roles but they're more than matched by Delany, Carroll, Donal Donnelly (as the ever-so-slightly drunk Freddy Malins), Dan O'Herlihy (as the ever-so-slightly antagonistic Mr. Browne) and everyone else, including the ever-reliable Colm Meaney.

John Huston deserves a lot of praise for capping a fantastic directorial career with a movie that never reflects just how his health was failing while it was being made but I can't lie, there was something about this movie that left me unengaged. Perhaps just the beauty and the nature of the material left it all feeling slightly too artificial for me to lose myself in. Perhaps.

The Dead is certainly worth your time but whether you end up loving it or not is another matter entirely.

6/10

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