[Film Review] You Are Not My Mother (2022)

There’s an overwhelming sense throughout You Are Not My Mother that something is…off. Glances are held for a fraction of a second too long. Whispers just a decibel too loud. Characters linger just at the edges of shadows and rooms. The music is  slightly off key and human movements are  awkward enough to be wrong. It’s a fitting uncanniness that, against a background of dreary Dublin fall, creates a subtle atmosphere of dread that seeps in and dampens your bones. Kate Dolan’s psychological horror joins the ranks of Caveat, Sea Fever and The Hole in the Ground as the latest in a boom of effective, gut-achingly tense Irish horrors that take inspiration from the region’s natural and often stark beauty, as well as its rich history of Celtic folklore.

You Are Not Mother follows teenager Char (a stern faced and stony eyed Hazel Doupe) who, with a woeful weariness on her face, is a girl on the edge. Not only is she shouldering the sodden weight of being a target for - perhaps unrealistically - sociopathic bullies at school, her home life is marred by her role as caretaker for her mother. Angela (a wide-eyed and wonderfully creepy Carolyn Bracken) spends her ‘low days’ languid, unable to leave her bed, forgetting to eat or  drop Char to school. It’s on one of these late school rushes that Angela finally breaks, with a heartbreaking phrase that no child should ever have to hear their parent utter: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’

And then, Angela is gone.

Allegories between mental health and horror have always been common, but have seen an uptick in sensitive representations as conversations about mental health become more prevalent. Hereditary, Black Swan and Relic are but a few examples from the last decade that have accurately mastered slowburn presentation of the parallels between psychological and spiritual sickness. But sadly, demonisation and disrespect towards those who suffer from mental illness is still rife in horror (More recently, M Night Shyamalan’s Old presents such an offensive ‘violent schizophrenic’ trope that you might be hard pressed to believe it was released this year). 

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Thankfully, You Are Not My Mother falls into the camp of the former, and offers a realistic presentation of mental illness, without a crude reliance on overdone clichés. When Angela returns, she is noticeably different, her mood more upbeat and then progressively spiraling upwards into mania. There’s enough ambiguity present in the first two acts to leave us guessing whether or not Angela is a woman suffering only from mental illness, but not so much ambiguity that the film is stripped of any comment on it entirely. Is her frenzied, feral dancing a product of a bipolar swing, or a body possessed by something supernatural? Has she lost her appetite because of the pills, or because she no longer requires human food? This tonal opacity is reflected in the setting of the film – Samhain, when the door between worlds is at its weakest. 

As the film reaches its climax, You Are Not My Mother strays somewhat from this ambiguity and wisely chooses to move through the door of a more concrete path. It’s suspicious Granny (Ingrid Craigie) who showcases more than a passing knowledge of malevolent beings when she reveals the truth behind Char’s past and the reason for Angela’s shift in personality and physicality. You Are Not My Mother cleverly opts to keep its grotesqueries to a minimum when presenting Angela’s shedding human body through marvelously unsettling hints of body horror always cast under shadow, and just enough to have you, and Char’s bullies, wondering ‘what the fuck is that?’ As Char and Angela are finally engulfed in an inferno of guilt, grief and the agony of maternal distrust, You Are Not My Mother scales heights that are grand in emotion and flit between the realm of realism and…somewhere else entirely.

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