When finding your angle on a film review, it can be helpful to use dialogue as inspiration. From brothers Max and Sam Eggers, A24’s “The Front Room” is a wildly inappropriate horror effort that offers several good options in this regard.
“Why can’t I DIE?!”
“I’m a racist baby, goo-goo, gah-gah.”
“Stop crying for yourself.”
“Just…let me know who wins.”
“Are you KIDDING me?”
Take your pick of those lines or combine a couple. Whatever you come up with won’t get close to the sheer ridiculousness in this bonkers co-directorial debut. Starring Brandy as the very pregnant Belinda, the Eggers twins’ first feature is a melodramatic fairytale about end-of-life caregiving, generational racism, and hating the literal shit out of your mother-in-law. This feces-centric film is better off not compared to the work of the filmmakers’ older brother, Robert Eggers; although, there are specks of surreal fantasy akin to “The Witch” or “The Lighthouse.”
The latter movie, which Robert and Max wrote together, might explain how something as ill-conceived as “The Front Room” got made. Gross and goofy, this semi-supernatural home invasion is mostly about one woman’s struggle to clean up another woman’s excrement. That’s not an interpretation of a motif or an exaggeration of one scene. That’s an honest-to-god fact of this movie’s runtime. Your individual appetite for seeing a senior citizen splash around in her own urine could and should determine whether you witness this spectacular miscalculation first-hand. If you do, just remember you were warned.
Opposite Brandy, “The Front Room” scene stealer Kathryn Hunter is undeniable as the cartoonish antagonist Solange. Known lately for playing the witches in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” the unflappable character actress appears here as a rich southern belle in rapid decline.
With a stack of cash in her pocketbook as thick as her twangy accent, Solange uses the promise of a hefty inheritance to manipulate her stepson, Norman (Andrew Burnap), and his wife, Belinda, into becoming both her landlord and live-in hospice staff. The elderly woman — who is brash, bawdy, and way past “men-o-pause” — prays often and sometimes speaks in tongues. That extreme evangelical faith left her estranged from Norman years ago, but now, Solange says, they don’t have much time left. Plus, she’s sorry (sort of) and she needs somewhere to die.
A patchwork of crazy-making wallpaper plasters the interior of the couple’s overly formal, fixer-upper home. The rooms are lit, often top-down, with a monotonous sameness that reminds of a musty nursing home where lamps operate on automatic timers. The titular front room, where Solange sleeps, glows with menacing warmth as the rest of the shadowy space fades into a bland, cool-colored aesthetic that’s oddly Blumhouse-esque.
The suffocating result is a padded cell perfect for Belinda and Solange to exhaust each other — and the audience — as debates about furniture and baby names escalate into fights invoking the Holy Spirit and U.S. Confederacy. It’s a battle for control by any means necessary with the aging Southern aggressor eager to weaponize her bodily fluids…most often targeting Belinda’s clothing and face.
What transpires between Solange and Belinda is objectively horrifying, if rarely in the standard scary movie sense. This revolting “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” imitator will disturb audiences, no doubt, and that’s reason enough for some people to watch it. But what this crass horror comedy does isn’t as important as how it does that — or why.
Overwrought with visual style but relentlessly one-note, “The Front Room” is willfully annoying and dubious in its purpose. Shredding through an increasingly dumb script, the Eggers smugly embrace tasteless genre tropes that they could have just as easily subverted. Is this a faithful and raw homage to the psycho-biddy stereotype? Or two indie horror directors making a shit-post? The answer could be both, but neither seems worthy of committing to film.
That an old white racist is living with a young Black mother isn’t lost on the Eggers brothers, who as co-writers only loosely adapt author Susan Hill’s short story of the same name. In an incendiary dinner table scene, Solange tosses a napkin on her head and mocks her daughter-in-law with a clownish, keyed-up Ku Klux Klan impression.
Both actors appear to be very much in on the knowingly offensive joke, but the scene’s bizarre energy — delivered at an 11, like everything else in this movie — leans more juvenile than jarring. Setting your audience on edge is one thing but making a pointlessly problematic endurance test is another. “The Front Room” fails to indicate that its storytellers know the difference.
Other recent hagsploitation flicks, like Ti West’s “X” and Zach Creggers’ “Barbarian,” have come under fire for depicting older women’s bodies as monstrous and sexless. As a woman and critic, I didn’t personally take issue with those movies and instead saw their villains as justified if flawed experiments in contemporary camp. What the Eggers do with the low-brow Solange has a harder time passing that same sniff test, even when underlined by Hunter’s hyper-committed portrayal.
It’s not the end of the world to have another gross old woman on the big screen — but coming from the cult-favorite studio and these siblings, it’s at least unimpressive. Sure, there’s an immediate impact to these deeply alarming depictions of geriatric healthcare. And yet, devoid of empathy, the Eggers’ story gives away a carelessness that feels gross. As the faux-infantile Solange, frequently feigning needs for Norman and Belinda’s help, Hunter achieves a handful of hysterical physical comedy moments that are worth seeing if you’re into shock-value. (That includes an Oediupus-inspired beat featuring Burnap that makes his upcoming role in Disney’s live-action “Snow White” much more entertaining.) But those laughs won’t always sit right with attentive viewers.
Brandy’s character doesn’t fare much better than Hunter’s, but that’s a shared effort between the actress and the Eggers’ script. Early on, Belinda is saddled with a stillbirth storyline that feels misplaced and Brandy spends much of the movie struggling to find a performance that makes the grim backstory belong here. The specter of baby Wallace — who died before Belinda got pregnant this second time — looms over the house and conjures a spooky atmosphere that works for about ten minutes (*).
Solange’s menacing use of two canes…thump, THUMP…thump, THUMP…cuts through the ethereal tension at first and Brandy does her best work in those more sinister, sneaking-around beats. Still, the Eggers waste no time getting Solange into some adult diapers and plunging Brandy into a basin of toilet humor that’s consistently embarrassing and at times mindlessly problematic.
(* Coincidentally, ten minutes is roughly the same amount of time that Belinda spends employed as an anthropology professor before rage-quitting her university department over a single missed appointment in Act One. “She used to have a baby — now she doesn’t!” and “She used to have a job — now she doesn’t”! aren’t character traits for complex women. They’re negative points for the Bechdel test. But…whatever.)
“The Front Room” seems to know it’s a tonal disaster (how else does an upbeat viral pop mash-up land in a completely unrelated trailer?), but maybe there’s no point to being tidy when you’re just screwing around with your audience’s gag reflex. Guaranteed to make headlines and divide the average A24 crowd, this inaugural outing from the younger Eggers will find fans but can be safely skipped by most other horror enjoyers. To borrow another line from “The Front Room,” this one from Solange singing while she is canonically mid-piss, it’s just a “MESS. M-E-DOUBLE-S MESS.”
Grade: C-
An A24 release, “The Front Room” opens in theaters on Friday, September 6.
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