Rating: 6.5/10
**This review contains spoilers.**
Released on Sept. 6, “The Front Room” is a psychological horror film that follows newly pregnant mother Belinda (Brandy Norwood) as she navigates the trials of connecting with her baby under the eye of her eccentrically religious mother-in-law, Solange (Kathryn Hunter.)
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“The Front Room” is an A24 production, following in the company’s long line of critically acclaimed horror hits like “Pearl” (2022), “Midsommar” (2019) and “Hereditary” (2018). The film is directed by the Eggers Brothers, well-known for their respective contributions to the genre with movies like “The Witch” (2015) and “The Lighthouse” (2019).
Initially, “The Front Room” doesn’t seem all that different from its peers. The cinematography meets the high standard of every other A24 film, told through reflections in the mirrors around the house as well as crackling organs and trembling strings that haunt the background of the movie.
The church at which Belinda first meets Solange is expectedly culty — all wide smiles, bright eyes and writhing tongues — and Solange later throws in a few dialogues of incoherent demonic praying for good measure.
A wrinkled membership certificate from The Daughters of the Confederacy with Solange’s name on it and a couple of dinner table microaggressions later, one wonders how “The Front Room” will play out differently from other horror stories like “Get Out” (2017) that deal with enthusiastically racist senior citizens.
The movie makes no secret of its criticism of Christian radicalism, especially with regard to the United States’ complicated history and uncertain future. Norman (Andrew Burnap), Brandy’s white husband, warns her that Solange likely will not approve of their interracial marriage.
In a bizarrely comical scene where Solange childishly play-acts as a Ku-Klux-Klan member (of which her character is a descendant) by dangling a white napkin over her head, it is obvious that the face-off between Belinda and her mother-in-law represents more than just a tired inter-family trope.
When Belinda confronts Solange with the question of how her half-Black granddaughter will be treated in the pure God-fearing state she envisions, their clash becomes one of cultural and generational proportions. In an interview with Collider, Norwood said she went to therapy to “get it all out” because of the toll of recreating such social divides between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.
As a main character put in an impossible position, Norwood wears a lot of hats throughout the film and wears them well. The audience can’t help but root for Belinda as she transitions from an anxious mother and underappreciated professor to a jaded daughter-in-law driven to murder.
Thankfully, “The Front Room” tackles the topic with some nuance instead of merely saying racism is bad and leaving it at that.
For one, the movie points out how the values of white Christian America hold back even its own believers. Solange reveals she was a model and actress in her youth before her husband put a stop to her ambitions. Her self-infantilization in an effort to manipulate Norman against Belinda is a hard-to-watch show of a white woman’s tears, rather than the checkmate move of manipulation that she seems to think it is.
The strangest element of what is already an incredibly weird movie is just how funny it is. Although “The Front Room” takes on some noble and relevant themes, it does so in a manner that is sometimes hard to take seriously at the expense of those important messages.
Unlike “Bodies Bodies Bodies” or “Us” — both horror films chock full of social commentary that is consciously comedic — “The Front Room’s” hilarity is difficult to place as intentional or unintentional. This makes for a distracting watch, as every scene that induces a chuckle feels like laughing at a funeral.
One cannot ignore Hunter’s vital contribution to the movie’s tone as the deeply off-putting and unpredictably hilarious Solange, who is by far the most memorable performance of the film. Her signature laugh is perfectly grating, almost like a dusty corpse coughing itself back to life, and she pulls off the antics of her religious zealot of a character masterfully. The inflections of her Southern drawl are enough to make you laugh one moment and reel back in disgust the next.
Despite “The Front Room’s” overstayed stint as a comedy, the movie should not be dismissed because of its peculiarity. If anything, it is refreshing to live in a time when audiences laugh at — not with — racist caricatures, and can see just how ridiculous and flawed the values they represent truly are.
