Shudder Saturday: The Voices Of Our Mother (2026)

The second feature to be written and directed by Mark O'Brien (who has also been acting in front of the camera for a number of years, and gives himself a role here), The Voices Of Our Mother is part horror movie and part dysfunctional family drama. It's just a shame that none of it really feels original, despite an effective ending that makes up for some of the issues elsewhere.

Sheila McCarthy plays Harriet, a seriously ill woman who is joined by her children as they wait to see what will happen next. Will she improve, or will their visit be one last opportunity to speak with their mother? Annika (Georgina Reilly) is the most level-headed and responsible family member, William (O'Brien) and Therese (Carolina Bartczak) have a major issue between them that leads to a palpable sense of real animosity, and Martin (Alex Ozerov-Meyer) is the seemingly-obligatory family member with addiction issues. 

This could have been an effective and creepy little film. O'Brien has a lot of the right elements in place. He keeps everyone in a single setting, for the most part, he keeps his central cast small, and he works with a main premise that has the potential to go in any number of different directions. Unfortunately, either due to his instincts as an actor or due to a lack of commitment to the horror genre, he doesn't come close to realising the full potential of the thing. The bickering, the secrets being revealed, the problematic relationship with a parent, it's all been done time and time again. It was crying out for more chills and scares to be added, but O'Brien doesn't go down that route.

There's still enough to enjoy here, but that's down to the cast more than the writing and direction. Reilly is always very good onscreen, and does well here to hold her place as the lead. O'Brien and Bartczak are enjoyably unpleasant to one another, Ozerov-Meyer is saddled with the weakest role, but tries to do a good job, and McCarthy manages to make a strong impression, despite the fact that her character is so frail and quiet for most of the runtime.

As mentioned at the start of this review, however, the ending works. It's a surprisingly impactful and interesting way to tie everything up in a nice neat bow, even if it may also make you slightly resentful of the time spent elsewhere on less interesting developments. You could argue that the "quiet before the storm" makes everything better when it's time for the big ending, but I would have much preferred something that did a better job of interspersing the rest of the narrative with a healthy selection of surprises and scares.

O'Brien might yet have a great film in him. This isn't it, but he shows that he has mastered enough of the basics to put him in very good stead for whenever he gets his hands on a better screenplay, whether that is written by himself or someone else. He could even do himself a favour by disassembling and fully reworking this to see how much better he could make it.

5/10

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Shudder Saturday: Shadow Of God (2025)

Whether it's completely incompetent or just slightly mishandled, Shadow Of God is an awful movie that should not have been allowed to come to fruition. It's clear what happened. Someone thought "aha, we'll do an exorcism movie, but the main spirit to be exorcised could be god." And that's all they really had. Because there's nothing else here, beyond that one idea, that makes any good impression.

Mark O'Brien plays Mason Harper, a super-exorcist, the kind of exorcist that other exorcists ask to help them out on the biggest exorcisms. Things take a turn for the strange when Mason's father, Angus (Shaun Johnston), turns up. Angus has been out of his life for many years, mainly due to him being dead. Different people have different interests in the end result of this, but it will all boil down to just how Mason and Angus deal with one another.

Director Michael Peterson isn't a first-timer, which is a big surprise. I even quite enjoyed one of his previous features, Knuckleball. I haven't previously encountered the work of writer Tim Cairo, but he has a similar number of projects under his belt. Both of these men should have known better than this, and both should have either spent a lot more time on honing the central idea or just accepting that it wasn't strong enough.

Things aren't helped by the leads either. O'Brien isn't very good, sadly, and never feels like anything else but an actor trying hard to deliver his lines. The same goes for Johnston. Adrian Hough does a bit better with his role, although the screenplay wastes the opportunity for his character to be much more interesting than he is, and Jacqueline Byers is very good in the role of the sympathetic, and potentially due-to-be-endangered, Tanis Green.

If I'm feeling charitable then I guess some may find enough to enjoy here, if they're after a film that hints at roads it never commits to driving down. There's not enough full-blooded horror, not enough to make you care about the characters, and the philosophical Gordian knot at the heart of it all is actually just two bits of drying string that unwind and snap with the application of the slightest pressure. I cannot recommend anything here, and I have been trying to think of one decent audio and/or visual highlight. 

There have been many bad exorcism movies over the years, as well as a few very good ones, and this sadly joins that list of failures. Just how bad is it? Well . . . I'd probably choose to watch The Exorcist: Believer ahead of having to rewatch this. THAT'S how bad it is.

2/10

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Ready Or Not (2019)

If you haven't seen Ready Or Not yet then what have you been up to? Oh, I get it, you have just been too busy, like myself, dealing with life stuff. It's not always easy to get along to the cinema, even when something is being raved about, as this was.

Samara Weaving plays Grace, a young woman who is taken to the family home by her hubby-to-be, Alex (Mark O'Brien). The wedding arrangements allow for the usual mix of friendliness, civility, barbed comments, and resentment, but things take a turn for the worse when Grace is asked that evening to draw a card, one which will decide on a game the family has to play. She draws one that says "hide and seek", and it turns out that this means the family has to hunt and kill her before sunrise, or they believe they will be struck by a deadly curse.

Directed by the talented duo of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Ready Or Not is a fun and bloody romp (yes, I used the word romp here - deal with it) that is boosted by a few select talented cast members helping to raise the material. The canny casting is essential, as what could have been a sharp and witty script is surprisingly weak. Guy Busick and Ryan Murphy (AKA R. Christopher Murphy) do a good job of getting everyone into place and delivering the little morsels of exposition throughout, but they fail to do enough to raise this above a number of similar genre films from recent years (including the enjoyable Mayhem, which also starred Weaving). For those who have seen the film and don't agree with me at all, I'd like you to consider a) whether or not you enjoyed certain characters because of how they acted or because of who was portraying them, and b) how much worse this would have been with someone in the main role who didn't have the charisma of Weaving.

Fortunately, we DO have the charisma of Weaving, who seems to have been poised on the very edge of proper stardom for a couple of years now. She's consistently brilliant in this, moving believably from someone understandably freaked out by events to someone determined to survive. O'Brien is okay as the love of her life, despite showing no hint of what someone might see in him. Thankfully, you get a wonderfully wry turn from Adam Brody, trying to stay drunk while he wearies of the family traditions, Henry Czerny is superb as the patriarch of the family, and Andie MacDowell is amusingly unfazed by anything that happens. Her role may be a relatively small one, but it's her best in some time.

What works here is the commitment to lining up the gory surprises as people are killed off, one by one, some of them directly involved in the whole scheme and some of them just "innocent" bystanders. Plenty of blood is spattered over people, with most of it ending up on Weaving, and there's a nice balance of moments to make you wince and moments to make you laugh aloud, but I would once again emphasise that it all seems to work as well as it does thanks to the direction and the way the main players sell it.

A good time is guaranteed for most genre fans, but if you have cast your net far and wide in the past year then I'll be very surprised if this ends up as your absolute favourite horror of 2019. It might even be struggling to get into a Top 5 for some voracious cinephiles.

7/10

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