Certificate: 15
Running Time: 95 mins
UK Distributor: Universal Pictures
UK Release Date: 25 October 2024
Brandy Norwood, Kathryn Hunter, Andrew Burnap, Neal Huff, Mary Testa
Max Eggers and Sam Eggers (directors, writers), Babak Anvari, David Hinojosa, Julia Oh and Lucan Toh (producers), Marcelo Zarvos (composer), Ava Berkofsky (cinematographer), Eric Kissack and Benjamin Rodriguez Jr. (editors)
A pregnant woman (Brandy) becomes increasingly disturbed by her ailing stepmother-in-law (Hunter)…
Ageism is an unspoken truth within horror, given the way that old people are constantly portrayed as grotesque beings with unsettling cackles and a noticeable number of missing teeth, hair etc. While effective, as it clearly plays into the genuine fear that people have of the elderly, the image of the scary grandmother or the sinister grandfather can sometimes feel a bit insensitive. At the end of the day, they are just people near the end of their lives whose bodies are beginning to malfunction and are more prone to physical and mental ailments than the more youthful crowd, so constantly positioning them as decrepit monsters that are meant to be feared has always not sat right for me within certain horror films.
With that in mind, you can probably imagine that I have a lot of strong emotions about The Front Room, a film which depicts its central old figure as the most sinister, conniving and often rather gross individual you could possibly imagine. While there certainly is a lot to say about that, the film is honestly more obnoxious than it is truly scary, because writer-director duo Max and Sam Eggers – the brothers of more prolific auteur Robert Eggers – aim less for genuine chills and more for outrageous dark comedy, but with not quite as compelling results as they should be.
The film begins as Belinda (Brandy Norwood), a heavily pregnant university professor, and her lawyer husband Norman (Andrew Burnap) attend the funeral of Norman’s father. There, they meet Norman’s estranged and deeply religious stepmother Solange (Kathryn Hunter), who makes the couple a tempting offer: they will receive her hefty inheritance if they accommodate her in their house before she dies. Right away, Solange makes their lives exceptionally difficult: she claims the front room of the house, which was intended to be the baby’s nursery; she makes numerous micro-aggressions toward Belinda (even pronouncing her name “Belin-dur”) that mask her thinly veiled racism; she invites similarly devout members of her church to gather and speak in tongues for some bizarre sermons; her growing incontinence speaks for itself; and she even forces the couple to reconsider the name they have chosen for their unborn child. Eventually, the initial hospitality turns into a battle of wits between Belinda and Solange, as the latter attempts to claim control of the household through her oddly unexplained divine powers.
That particular revelation is the closest that The Front Room ever comes to full-on supernatural horror, because the film otherwise remains fairly grounded in its overall nature – though even then, there’s an argument to be made about whether or not it even touches the ground at all. The Eggers brothers adopt a somewhat campy tone that highlights the exaggerated pitch-black humour of the situation, like it’s a lost Larry Cohen movie from the 90s that goes all in with its sharp satire amidst some vivid genre-based storytelling. However, the film as a whole isn’t nearly as intelligent, for it largely relies on shock value and disgusting imagery to rattle its audience rather than provide any meaningful commentary. Scenes of Solange coughing up brown-coloured phlegm and frequently wetting or soiling herself are certainly nauseating, but there is nothing else being said other than “look how gross old people can be,” something that once again puts the ageism problem within horror on full display.
Respect, though, to actor Kathryn Hunter for fully committing to such a monstrous figure. A fantastic physical performer, as past screen roles in The Tragedy of Macbeth and Poor Things can attest, Hunter all too gleefully transforms herself into an intimidating presence as she leans into the utter campiness of her character, with mannerisms and demeanours straight out of Tod Browning’s Freaks. She makes for a memorable antagonist, constantly belittling Norwood’s Belinda with passive-aggressive taunts and barely disguised prejudice (to further cement the character’s seething racism, she proudly displays a certificate designating her as a “Daughter of the Confederacy”), while always hiding behind her unhealthily obsessive devotion to her faith.
It’s a performance that easily towers over the rest of the film, but that in and of itself is a problem because The Front Room struggles to offer much else beyond that. For their feature debut, the Eggers brothers show promise with some ambitious shots and eerie use of its theremin-heavy soundtrack, but the filmmakers don’t seem to recognise that there needs to be more than just an unsettling atmosphere to stimulate horror audiences. The characters, outside of Solange, aren’t particularly interesting, the scares are muted, and as a dark comedy it’s more irritating than genuinely funny. There is also the uncomfortable notion that the film may be making a slim argument in favour of elder abuse, for as cartoonishly vile and unpleasant as Solange may be, Belinda’s growing disdain for her ailing stepmother-in-law – to where she actively leaves her to literally wallow in her own filth – borders on pure mean-spiritedness, and the fact that it’s treated as some kind of hilarious applause moment in this supposed dark comedy makes it even more questionable.
Sadly, this kind of screen ageism is unlikely to go away any time soon, and thanks to The Front Room it unfortunately looks like that disdain for the elderly within the horror genre is here to stay. While the Eggers brothers show promise in their own approach to the craft, not to mention the film-stealing turn by Kathryn Hunter who seems to have understood the assignment better than the actual filmmakers, this is a film that just leaves you feeling grossed out, and not in the way that a horror film usually should.
The Front Room offers some interesting filmmaking and a cartoonishly grotesque central turn by Kathryn Hunter, but it does little other than to reinforce an uncomfortable ageism within the horror genre that borders on nastiness and relies on shock value over actual intelligence.
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