TIFF 2021: You Are Not My Mother
TIFF 2021Halloween certainly comes with its traditions and expectations, especially in film. However, in Ireland, October 31 is draped in a bit more specific lore. It was a day to be celebrated, not unlike New Year’s Day, as it notes the time when crops have been harvested and stored for the winter. It was a celebration of grand fires, which were to be continually lit. And it was also a time when it was believed that the cycle of the spirit world was closest to the cycle of our natural world, thus making the distance between the two realms the thinnest. Kate Dolan’s mediocre, yet still spooky directorial debut, You Are Not My Mother, effectively pulls this folklore into a modern family horror.
You Are Not My Mother is a steadily edgy little film. However, it doesn’t excel at anything. Dolan doesn’t delight in jump scares or creating anything that is too terribly gruesome. The suspense is omnipresent, but the screws are never tightened as tight as they’ll go. She’s content to let her film steadily brood. Unexplained behaviour creates adequate unsettled atmosphere and ready-to-go suspense, and it should be mentioned that this is no small thing. However, for all that the film does well, it never elevates anything that might be on the audience’s radar for this genre.
The film has a decent opening involving a rather disturbing fire sacrifice – narrative-wise at least; it’s not so upsetting visually. The cranky grandmother (Ingrid Craigie) slowly shifts from what seems to be a one-note convention into one of the film’s better characters and performances. The script itself, though, builds its runtime off subplots with bully kids and lonely school girl dynamics with its main character, Char (Hazel Doupe). We’ve regrettably seen this mean girls and lonely girl subplot nonsense a million times before, and it exists here to provide forced character development and standard plot checkpoints to navigate the story to through to the end. It’s too bad that Dolan’s nuanced layering of Samhain into the story didn’t extend to a similar depth of character for Char.
You Are Not My Mother features decent visuals, but it never latches onto any meaningful iconography on which to let its terror ride. The source of much of the suspense comes from Char’s mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken), her weird disappearance, and ensuing behaviour. You Are Not My Mother is told through Char’s eyes as she acts as the audience’s conduit for concern and confusion as she watches her mother behave weirdly and threateningly. However, the horror here never really turns into anything that we haven’t seen before. There are no particularly striking horror scenes. It’s just all matter-of-factly handled until the script finally starts explaining unknowns and builds itself to a decent climax. You Are Not My Mother is an effective enough little film, particularly in the context of coming to be via a micro-budget and during a Covid lockdown. However, it just doesn’t frighten much or resonate afterward.