Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Adam O'Brien
Starring: Emily Hampshire, François Arnaud, Christian Convery, Mariah Inger, Erika Rosenbaum
Director Adam O'Brien's feature debut Mom is
another horror movie about a mother fearing that something is out to
get her newborn child. In this case it's the mother herself, or at
least the forces that may be manipulating her.
Meredith (Emily Hampshire) and Jared (Francois Arnaud)
arrive home from the hospital with their new baby boy Alex. Jared is
beaming at the idea of being a father, but Meredith isn't so keen on
being a mother. When Jared returns to work, leaving Meredith to look
after Alex all day, she slumps into an extreme form of postpartum
depression, leaving the kid unattended in dirty nappies. She also
becomes plagued by visions of an older, roughly five-year-old version
of Alex (Christian Convery), a woman whose face is covered with
straggly black hair, and centipedes crawling out of cracks in the
wall.
This drives a wedge between Meredith and Jared, who begin attending
therapy sessions together. The therapist (Mariah Inger) gives
some trite instructions like counting to 10 when stressed, but they
prove useless in helping Meredith, whose behaviour becomes
increasingly disturbing.
While best known for comic roles and her part on Canadian sitcom
Schitt's Creek, Hampshire has dabbled in the horror genre before.
Mom is by far her darkest role yet however, and she
takes to it with ease. As the unnerved and always on edge Meredith,
Hampshire is both sympathetic and scary. We feel sorry for what she's
going through, but we also fear for what she might be pushed to do to
her child.
The trouble with Mom is that it shares the same issue
as Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining, that of a protagonist who seems demented from the off rather than
gradually losing it over teh course of the film.
Mom doesn't ease us in to Meredith's troubles, rather
they begin immediately in a fashion that's somewhat jolting. We're
left to wonder if Meredith was always this troubled or if her
personality changed once she became a mother.
The movie also suffers from an incident at the end of the first act
that disregards Hitchcock's advice that a movie should never detonate
its metaphorical bomb. Everything we had been invested in up to that
point is suddenly erased from the narrative, making it difficult to
rewire ourselves to follow a new plot line. As the worst thing that
could have happened has indeed already occurred, the remaining stakes
feel considerably lower.
Mom struggles to offer anything new to the horror
genre. It's too reliant on clichés borrowed from the sort of Asian
horror movies that were popular at the turn of the century. Dripping
water and damp? Check. Female ghost with long black hair? Check.
Asshole husband with little empathy for his troubled spouse?
Check.
Fans of Hampshire will enjoy seeing the comic star get to exercise
her more dramatic side, but there's little else to recommend
Mom. Given how closely it replicates the sort of trauma many women go
through with real life postpartum depression, it also can't help but
come off as a little exploitative and mean-spirited. But above all
else, it's just not very scary. Unlike a newborn child,
Mom won’t keep you up at night.
Mom received its world premiere at Glasgow FrightFest
on 9 March.
