Belinda and Norman are a young educated couple with bougie tastes, a pauper’s budget, and a baby on the way. Belinda’s on edge - her first pregnancy ended in stillbirth, and her decision to abruptly quit her university teaching job when academe turned out not to be an enlightened meritocracy caused the cash crunch they’re in. Norman’s on edge because his estranged father just died, and he’s finally spilled the beans about his traumatic childhood (mainly at the hands of his deranged stepmother Solange).
Belinda encourages him to attend the funeral so he can close the book, and at the funeral they’re offered a Faustian bargain - take Solange into their home for her final years, and all their money troubles will be over.
Enter Solange (played by the magnificent Katherine Hunter). She isn’t just a manipulative, gaslighting harpy - her fervent faith seems to give her supernatural power. She knows the baby’s sex just by touching Belinda’s belly, and when her creepy prayer group descends on Belinda and lays hands on her, her c-section wound heals within a day.
Solange is determined to control everything and everyone, and it isn’t long before she’s trying to supplant Belinda as the baby’s mother. What follows is a pitched battle for dominance between the old and the young. Solange’s weapons are her deranged spite, her money, and her incontinence. Belinda’s weapons are her vigor, her relative sanity, and time.
This is another one that could be fairly classified as a pitch-black social comedy, but I saw a legit horror film that’s grappling with some very real issues in a compelling way. Brandy’s performance is excellent, and nobody does creepy old crone like Kathryn Hunter (who seems to be having the most fun of her long career).
There are some issues: the setup is a “subtext-as-dialogue” expo dump, they rub our noses in the body horror of aging waaaaay too much, and Solange’s dark religious power is firmly established but never really paid off. There’re also some odd tonal inconsistencies for a movie this dark - the score is a mashup of Psycho string trills and a Munsters synth warble, and Solange’s two-handed crone cane crawl is so over-the-top it’s almost laughable.
I’m at risk for bias because I have mad respect for A24s cred with art-house horror, and we’re all prone to seeing roses where there’s shit when it’s coming from a trusted source (Democrats insist Harris isn’t vapid, and Republicans insist Trump isn’t deranged, after all). I’ll say in my defense that while I loved Egger’s The Witch and The Lighthouse, I absolutely hated The Northman.
So maybe I’m wrong but I detected a subtle irony in the parallel arcs of the mothers (Solange and Belinda), and methinks Belinda did protest too much when she justified her choices in the coda and the final lingering shot. It felt queasy, and I couldn’t help wondering if the weight of necessary but terrible choices might leave Belinda as warped as Solange was. Why else would the filmmakers have bothered alluding to a time when Solange (as a younger woman) escaped untenable circumstances with controversial choices?
I liked this one, and on a scale of The Paper to All The President’s Men ima give it The Post.
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