Mother, May I? review – high-end horror put together with immense amount of style
This is a find. Writer-director Laurence Vannicelli’s follow-up to his little-seen debut Vera represents a classy, spare shard of quasi-horror so elevated it’s barely horror at all despite the deployment of a few supernatural bangs and whizzes. It’s more in the tradition of psychological thrillers from the old days that critics still pine for, such as Don’t Look Now (1973) or Obsession (1976), all teasing ambiguity and deep dives into the messier corners of lovers’ psyches. In this case, Mother, May I? goes sniffing around the dark cellars of the mind where men keep complicated feelings about their mothers locked up, but which break out and play havoc with romantic relationships in the present.
The mother at this heart of this story, Tracy (Robin Winn Moore) is met in the film’s opening moments lying dead on the floor, bugs crawling over her, as the authorities arrive to bag and tag her. Her only offspring, Emmett (Kyle Gallner), collects her ashes after the cremation and unceremoniously sprinkles them on a nearby lake, accompanied by his poet girlfriend Anya (Holland Roden). Then they inspect the home he inherited from Tracy but hasn’t visited in years, a lovely upstate New York barn conversion stuffed with mementoes of Tracy’s life as a bohemian dancer in her youth.
Gradually, we learn that Emmett went into care when he was young and can barely remember his mother, whom he still deeply resents for her apparent rejection of him. This all comes out via weird psychodrama experiments that Anya, whose mother is a therapist, insists Emmett participate in where they pretend to be each other in order to explore their feelings. That sounds awkward and bizarre on its own, but things get even weirder when they take magic mushrooms one night. Anya starts acting exactly like Tracy even though she never met the woman, wrapping scarves around her head in a way that recalls Little Edie in Grey Gardens; she keeps up the act long after the shrooms should have worn off. Is she possessed or just lost in her own head games?
Vannicelli unpacks those questions with style. In collaboration with cinematographer Craig Harmer, Vannicelli deploys vintage cinematic alienation-effect techniques including subtle zooms, long held long-distance shots, and positioning the actors so that they look straight into the cameras; all of this unsettles the atmosphere. Vannicelli doesn’t quite pull everything together in the last act, but there’s an immense amount of craft on display as well as some terrific acting from the two leads who play off one another so well. Also, how can you not love a film with such elegant punctuation in its title?
Mother, May I? is released on 21 August on digital platforms.