Like the long-outdated wallpaper decorating its titular parlor, The Front Room, the debut feature from twin brothers Max and Sam Eggers (siblings to Robert, director of The Witch, The Northman and the upcoming Nosferatu), is a strange presence, at once bright, odd and menacing. Though billed as a psychological, so-called “elevated” horror film in the vein of Hereditary and Talk To Me (also from A24, as trailers note), The Front Room immediately aims for something more campy and comic; in a pre-taped message played before the screening I attended, the film’s star Brandy Norwood pitched it as a satisfying revenge flick and urged audiences to “please get loud” in the theater.
The Front Room would, and certainly should, attract attention based on Norwood alone, in her first significant horror role since 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer. It is an underwhelming mixed bag of tricks, but Norwood is never less than compelling as Belinda, a heavily pregnant anthropology professor who routinely endures disrespect – from her apathetic students, patronizing administration and greedy academic department – with a soft smile and steel spine. But her capacity for bullshit gets tested when her lawyer husband Norman (a handsome yet rather flat Andrew Burnap) is contacted by his supremely religious and overbearing stepmother Solange (Kathryn Hunter), essentially turning Belinda into an adjunct in her own life.
The plot, and particularly Belinda and Norman’s relationship, is thinly sketched, just enough to get Solange into the couple’s creaky old mansion home, a recent purchase they have yet to pay off. Following Norman’s father’s death, Solange, who helped raised a murkily traumatized Norman – there’s not much to him besides his job as public defender and bland platitudes of support for Belinda – strong-arms the broke couple into taking her in, in exchange for paying off the mortgage. (Well, metaphorically strong-arms – arms uncomfortably askew, Solange uses very loud, ominous canes.)
Setting aside the ickiness of using an old woman’s naked, aged body to shock or disgust – a horror trope unfortunately invoked here – Hunter’s Solange is a genuinely unnerving, creepy, magnetic presence – a blend of honeyed southern gothic menace, Christian mysticism and Fox News grandma. What Hunter, chewing into each scene, lacks in stature, she makes up in discomfiting charisma that the Eggerses play nearly as much for laughs as they do suspense. Solange oversteps, takes over the nursery, undermines Belinda’s confidence in parenting. She appears to know things she shouldn’t, farts in Belinda’s direction, speaks in tongues.
And as Belinda weakens from pregnancy and an emergency C-section, she commands more and more of her time for increasingly wretched messes. The Front Room fixates, to effective if diminishing returns, on a true nightmare: someone else’s diarrhea, and no one to help you clean it up. For a good stretch of its 94-minute runtime, the film becomes less of the psychological thriller suggested by Solange’s “visions” or Belinda’s statues of ancient fertility gods than a testament to the nightmares of caretaking, as Belinda aids both her stubbornly unlatched infant and incontinent mother-in-law.
That’s arguably the most effective tack for The Front Room, which, though stylishly filmed, otherwise struggles for suspense or true camp madness. Reams of should-be provocative material go nowhere: Solange’s apparent supernatural abilities, an interracial marriage strained by a card-carrying Daughter of the Confederacy, Belinda’s reverence for pre-Christian gods, Solange’s weird group of tongues-speaking fellow believers, not to mention overly portentous sound design and tricky camera angles (cinematography by Ava Berkofsky). The Eggers brothers, who have each collaborated with Robert on his more successfully unsettling films, can craft the look of the atmospheric thriller, but not yet the feel; though there is one satisfying last-act twist, the bulk of the The Front Room is odd and increasingly unsatisfying buildup without payoff.
Still, there are a few nasty bits that hit, particularly for viewers sensitive to fecal matter on screen, and Norwood makes the case for a scream queen renaissance. And judging by the enthusiasm at the theater for Belinda’s sharpened jibes as Solange’s antics become impossible to ignore, The Front Room does capture one delicious, rich truth: hell hath no fury like a mother-in-law scorned.
The Front Room is out in US cinemas on 6 September and in the UK on 25 October
