Hunched, delirious and sporting a chewy drawl, Solange (craftily played by Kathryn Hunter), a nasty surprise, insinuates herself not into someone’s body but into her stepson Norman (Andrew Burnap) and his heavily pregnant wife Belinda’s (what should've been Brandy Norwood's triumphant return to the horror genre) modest house. With a “Daughters of the Confederacy” certificate and the repeated insults she casually throws Belinda’s way, Solange is obviously racist. But what ends up rattling the young couple most about this exceedingly Jesus-centric old woman isn’t necessarily her horrendous viewpoints, but her inability to control her bladder and bowels.
Men-o-pause.
Released by A24—pioneers of what some have dubbed "elevated horror"—and based on a short story of the same name by Susan Hill (of The Woman in Black fame) The Front Room was slated to be the mind-bendy horror darling of the season. The film was adapted and directed by Max and Sam Eggers, the kid brothers of director Robert Eggers—best known for The Witch and The Light House—the former of which helped define A24's particular brand of horror. (Is Nepo-bros a thing? Can we make a thing?)
*MILD SPOILERS FOR "THE FRONT ROOM" FROM THIS POINT*
Solange—a mad scientist gene-splice of Gollum and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane— is essentially an amalgamation of every crazy old biddy put to film. You've seen this caricature in The Shining. You've seen her in Rosemary's Baby. You've seen her more recently in Lee Daniel's The Deliverance. You've likely seen a dozen other iterations, and The Front Room is no different, reinstating the played-out trope of sexually active youths clashing against the miserable, aging monster. Which begs the question: How are women ever going to come to terms with the inevitability of aging when the only representations of our older bodies are used to horrify? The sagging breasts poised to repulse, the allegedly inevitable bitterness toward our young alleged adversaries. The objectification may not be sexual but it remains: the aging feminine form is still detached from the person who inhabits the body. Hopefully, eventually, a day will come where cinema accepts the aging femme with the same open arms it does its masculine counterpart. However, this recurring hagsploitation is a reminder that we are nowhere near that day.
*Steps down from soap box.
Thump, THUMP…Thump, THUMP.
Aside from it's failed send up of "the hag", the film, to put it frankly, is gross. One of its earliest "twists" is when it introduces Solange’s incontinence. Belinda—who's pregnant af—is forced to clean up the foul messes Solange regularly (and perhaps deliberately) leaves for her while her husband, Norman, is too busy struggling to work his way up in his career to touch down on the lives of women. Don't get me wrong, a lot can be done with Belinda thanklessly cleaning up her step-mom-in-law’s literal piss and sh*t (the slave to master parallels couldn't be more obvious). But if you’re going to make the very real plight of a significant percentage of the population an object of abject horror, you need to invest that plight with more than just the difficulty of the plight itself. It's clear Solange is weaponizing her incontinence against Belinda in order to try to break her, but the younger Eggers brothers don’t seem to have the storytelling or directorial chops to communicate that in a way that carries the movie.
It's a shame because ultimately, the main failure of The Front Room is one of abdication. What could've been a solid story of paranoia, or a lesson in how race plays out in academia, or a takedown of those who used to be sinners and who've somehow been saved by a higher power only to become both devout and devoutly hypocritical, or a horror space where religious trauma and Black womanhood collide (the set up is right there!), is instead a gasp-for-the-wrong-reasons inducing tale of child endangerment and old ladies getting knocked to the ground.
Brandy and Kathryn Hunter have amazing antagonistic chemistry. And both deliver layered and compelling performances—Hunter in particular is a powerhouse, bursting with maniacal energy in every scene. Yet all of it is wasted on a film that can't decide if it wants its audience to be afraid, laugh out loud, or vomit. There's a very real socio-political reality to Solange’s twisted beliefs and antics, and rather than address any of them in a meaningful way, the younger Eggers choose instead to focus on chunky things swirling down toilets.
2/5 ⭐: A feature length fetish for human waste and elderly abuse.
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