There are films that survive by the commitment of their lead actor. The Front Room, for better or worse, desperately wants to be one of them. Max and Sam Eggers (first-time directors and the brother of The Northman’s Robert Eggers) make a brilliant choice centering their debut around Kathryn Hunter, a venerated stage actress who takes the term “transformation” to improbable heights. As Solange, an aging Southern scion with a savior complex, she’s the obvious star of The Front Room — but her talents here aren’t a highlight so much as the film’s only saving grace.
There’s not much else going for a story so obsessed with back-and-forth arguments and bodily fluids. The Eggers brothers have a lot of great ideas, glancing over themes of evangelical hypocrisy, the divine feminine, and a lot more in the span of two hours. But it never turns out to be more than a passing interest, and what could have been a great new horror entry is ultimately damned by a lack of conviction.
The Front Room was inspired by a short story of the same name written by Susan Hill, and you feel the scantness of its source material every step of the way. It’s not that short stories can’t inspire feature films — Hill’s tale admittedly supplies a strong foundation — but the Eggers should have added a lot more to it.
The thinness begins with our beleaguered heroine, the very-pregnant Belinda (Brandy Norwood), who finds herself at her wits’ end in every area of her life. Her defining characteristics are “overlooked” and “underappreciated.” As a professor of anthropology at a local university, Belinda is fighting a losing battle. None of her students seem to care at all about her curriculum, which traces the shifting role of female deities from antiquity to the modern era. Subjectively, this is pretty fascinating stuff, if only in the subtle ways it informs her character.
Belinda’s home is something of a dollhouse on the surface, slathered down with grey-pastel wallpaper and overwhelmed by stuffy, samey furniture. It also may or may not be haunted. Belinda and her husband Norman (Andrew Burnap) are still reeling from the loss of their first pregnancy. Naturally, their relationship has been strained ever since, even if Belinda doesn’t believe in ghosts (aside from the ancient effigies that adorn her mantle, she’s hardly spiritual); and Norman, raised in an evangelical home that saddled him with a lifetime of religious trauma, doesn’t dare invoke the dead. But when his estranged father suddenly dies, both Norman and Belinda are forced to reckon with forces beyond their control.
When Solange, Norman’s stepmom, approaches him at the funeral — clad in a thick black veil and surrounded by praying disciples — The Front Room quickly snaps to life. Hunter wields Solange’s two canes with thunderous authority and throws out passive-aggressive platitudes with a malevolence that would send a chill down the spine of any preacher’s kid. Norman is suddenly 16 all over again, which leaves Belinda to make the decisions about Solange’s end-of-life care. As the couple are cash-strapped with a baby on the way, and Solange herself has a whopping inheritance at her disposal, they agree to invite their in-law into their home.
Solange’s initial introduction shines with promise, as do her first encounters with Belinda. The pair are headed straight for an ideological clash, one teased by the Confederate paraphernalia that Solange brings into their home and further established once she starts replacing Belinda’s goddess statues with Christian icons. The Front Room is at its most enticing when embracing its role as a religious farce: we’ve seen plenty of pregnancy horror, and hellish in-laws have long been a staple of the genre. But few stories examine how “pagan,” matriarchal spirituality competes with white Christian nationalism, and fewer still from the perspective of a Black female protagonist. Belinda’s plight is primed to explore an untapped avenue of horror; maybe even confront Black horror from a fresh angle.
Unfortunately, the Eggers brothers aren’t qualified to pull that particular thread, nor are they all that interested in it. Instead, The Front Room hones in on a very different kind of horror story, the kind that splices spiritual surrealism with a Mommy Dearest-inspired home invasion. Solange soon trades her all-knowing, holier-than-thou façade for that of a mewing babe; as she can’t control her bowel movements anymore (or just pretends not to), Belinda is left to clean up one mess after the next.
The Front Room relishes in gross-out gags galore, dropping its protagonist into a cycle of piss, excrement, old time-y gospel music, and eerie, impromptu prayer sessions. Belinda’s worst nightmare plays on a loop: Solange soils herself and she cleans up the mess, on and on as her house becomes a shrine to her own helplessness. It’s a disgusting, and darkly hilarious, game of chicken, especially given Hunter’s level of commitment. But putting so much emphasis on Solange and her tantrums leaves Belinda utterly forgotten; the Eggerses don’t give their heroine many opportunities to clap back.
There’s so much to say about a Black woman who suddenly lives to serve a bratty, bullheaded grandame, and The Front Room occasionally grasps at brilliance when approaching such an uncomfortable scenario head-on. Solange makes frequent jokes about her potential history with the Klu Klux Klan, even going so far as to dawn a white napkin and taunt Belinda about “real racism.” It’s ballsy and, thanks to Hunter, just cartoonish enough to keep you in your seat. But what happens after just isn’t enough to match — or even interrogate — such a narrative choice.
Belinda ultimately becomes a punching bag, doomed to circle the drain until Solange runs out of ways to soil herself, or The Front Room simply runs out of road. Its sparse story is in dire need of divine reinvention, and not even its brilliant central performance can truly save it.
