Studio: A24
Director: Max Eggers, Sam Eggers
Writer: Max Eggers, Sam Eggers
Producer: David Hinojosa, Julia Oh, Lucan Toh, Babak Anvari
Stars: Brandy Norwood, Andrew Burnap, Neal Huff, Kathryn Hunter, Mary Testa, Mary Catherine Wright, David Manis, Ellen J. Maddow
Review Score:
Summary:
A pregnant couple's lives are turned upside down when the husband's manipulative stepmother moves into their home.
Review:
Movie posters that mainly feature a star's head typically don't tell you much about the film. Not so with "The Front Room." Its plain poster tells you everything.
Take a look at the artwork where Brandy's face occupies most of the box. She's not smiling. She's not scowling. She's not sweating. She doesn't really have any expression at all. Not shock. Not anger. Not wickedness. Just a lot of jewelry in her ear. The only hint of horror comes from a shadow on a door shrunk into a lower corner. Astonishingly, this is a pitch perfect image for "The Front Room" because it accurately reflects the film's curiously low energy and curiouser inability to convey anything close to a consistent, distinctive tone.
Since director Robert Eggers made his name in genre entertainment with projects like "The Witch" (review here) and "Nosferatu," it stands to reason his half-brothers Max and Sam Eggers, who wrote and directed "The Front Room," might be inclined to follow in his fright film footsteps. That's how A24, another notable name in macabre thrillers, chose to market their movie, too.
Although horrific things happen, "The Front Room" isn't chiefly a horror film by traditional definitions or expectations. It's designed to be a black comedy, except it's not that dark, and not all that amusing, either.
Based on a short story by Susan Hill, "The Front Room" beats two dead horses with one whip by combining the "wicked stepmother" and "in-law from Hell" archetypes into a single cliched characterization. Brandy Norwood plays Belinda, a pregnant woman worried about motherhood after already losing one child in his infancy. Andrew Burnap plays her husband Norman, probably named as such to emphasize his milquetoast normality as an unremarkable sidekick whose existence Belinda occasionally remembers. She's an anthropology professor and he's an attorney, yet somehow they're in dire financial straits usually exclusive to less affluent families with deadbeat parents or unemployment problems.
Belinda sees a solution to their money struggles following the death of Norman's father. Norman hasn't seen his stepmother Solange in years. He warns his wife that Solange's religious beliefs, which include a claim of being possessed by the Holy Spirit, created an abusive household growing up, and he worries about inviting that into their home. But Solange strikes a bargain. She'll turn over every penny of her wealth in exchange for living out whatever time she has left with her stepson's growing family. They don't say no.
As Solange, Kathryn Hunter puts on an uneven performance that vacillates between completely convincing and obnoxiously cartoonish. The obnoxious part is arguably intentional. Solange's schtick involves being passive-aggressively racist and casually condescending in that "Who me? What are you talking about?" way where seniors defend problematic worldviews as merely being old-fashioned. Some of the cartoonishness may be intentional too, like Solange farting in Belinda's face to put an exclamation point on an argument. Put the two together though, and you end up needlessly needled by Hunter's exaggerated Southern drawl and saucer-sized eyes rocketing her to a totally different planet than the other two actors.
Title cards with peppy classical music accented by a warbling theremin sound suggest "The Front Room" might be a blend of off-kilter humor in sophisticated settings. That seems to be what the Eggers brothers intended, yet their movie gets mired in such a bland malaise of repetitive tedium, attempts to spice up scenery with visual shocks come across as desperate against a backdrop too boring to validate the campiness. In between repeated scenes of contentious dinner table conversations, Solange uses her incontinence to put pee puddles on furniture and spread feces on walls. There's even an entire montage of discolored clumps being flushed down toilets for those who can't get enough scat-related silliness. Then there are Belinda's strange visions, like seeing her grown husband suckling at his stepmother's shriveled breast, or Solange sprouting six such breasts while robed as the Virgin Mary to feed Belinda's baby.
The longer "The Front Room" holds on that single note of "isn't Solange awful," the more it becomes clear there isn't a meaningful message motivating Belinda's misery. The push-pull drama of Norman initially balking at Solange's presence, then Norman questioning Belinda's believability about the bad things his stepmother does behind his back, doesn't demand engagement any more than the inconclusive implication over which of the two women has the higher capacity for manipulation. When the film finally ends on an unsurprising reveal, various pieces have moved back to their original or to improved positions, furthering an "it was all a dream" notion where nothing that happened ever materially mattered anyway.
From my seat as someone who has already memory holed most of the movie in less time than required to watch it, "The Front Room's" primary objective appears to be to get on an audience's nerves as much as Solange tries getting on Belinda's. Maybe that's the real joke hidden in the movie's supposed humor. Too bad it comes at the viewer's expense.
Review Score: 35
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