JP Nunez
When you think of great horror villains, elderly people aren’t usually at the top of your list, but recent films like X and The Elderly have slowly started to change that perception. We’re beginning to realize that evil is unbound by age, so when I first heard about The Front Room, I was pretty intrigued. The movie promised to take the common mother-in-law from hell trope and transpose it into a more horrific, potentially even supernatural, key, and I was curious to see what evil tricks this geriatric monster had up her sleeve.
The Front Room was written and directed by Max and Sam Eggers, the brothers of famed genre filmmaker Robert Eggers, and it stars Brandy, Kathryn Hunter, and Andrew Burnap. In the film, Belinda and Norman are a young couple who seem to be living the dream. They both have good jobs, there’s a baby on the way, and they’re blissfully in love. But that all changes when Belinda quits her job. She feels like she’s slowly being pushed out anyway, so she decides to leave on her own terms. It seems like a good idea at first, but soon enough, the couple find themselves struggling to make ends meet.
At one point in the story, Belinda’s credit card gets declined when she tries to buy a can of paint, so she and her husband desperately need an influx of cash. In a bittersweet twist of fate, Norman’s father soon passes away, and his wealthy stepmother, Solange, wants to give him all her money. But there’s a catch. She’s going to move in with him and Belinda, and when she arrives, the couple’s life turns into a living hell. Solange manages to say something offensive almost every time she opens her mouth, and Belinda eventually starts to think the old woman wants to replace her as the matriarch of the household.
As you might be able to tell from that plot synopsis, The Front Room is a very contained story. It focuses almost exclusively on Belinda, Norman, and Solange, and it takes place primarily in Belinda and Norman’s house. So naturally, if this movie is going to work, its three main characters have to be excellent, and thankfully, they are.
Let’s start with Norman. The Front Room is largely about the increasingly antagonistic relationship between Belinda and Solange, so this guy kind of gets the short end of the stick. But despite that lack of prominence, actor Andrew Burnap still manages to make an impression. Apparently, Solange was a terrible mother to Norman, so when he first hears about his stepmother’s offer, he’s adamantly against it.
In fact, he’s so traumatized that even the mere mention of the old woman is enough to get him all out of sorts, and Burnap captures the man’s pain wonderfully. He makes you wonder how bad Solange can really be, and that creates a truly horrific mystique around her before she’s in a single frame of the film.
Next, let’s talk about Belinda. She’s played by Brandy, and this woman goes through a legitimate emotional roller coaster. Like any halfway decent human being, she’s initially super sweet to Solange, but as the old woman becomes increasingly insufferable, you can see the frustration build in Belinda’s facial expressions and body language. Sometimes she tries to bite her tongue, and other times she gives her mother-in-law a piece of her mind, but whatever she does, Brandy always makes you feel the character’s pain when Solange does something offensive or obnoxious.
But hands down, the best performance in The Front Room belongs to Kathryn Hunter. She plays the mother-in-law from hell, and she’s fantastic. Some of the comments Solange makes to Belinda are so rude and disrespectful you almost can’t believe anybody would say them out loud, but Hunter pulls them off with such conviction you won’t blink an eye.
Then, as the film goes on and we learn more about Solange, Hunter is asked to add a few wrinkles to her performance, and she knocks it out of the park every time. Whether she’s moaning and groaning in pain, arguing with Belinda, or giving off a more sinister vibe, this woman can do it all. I’d even say she’s the heart and soul of The Front Room, so she almost single-handedly carries the movie across the finish line.
Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t quite get there. As great as the three main characters are, this film has some big flaws that simply bring it down a bit too much. Most obviously, somewhat like the first hour of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the story simply isn’t good enough. Only this time, it’s the whole movie.
At its core, this is essentially the tale of an old woman who’s obnoxious to the nth degree, and in my book, that’s just not very interesting. To be fair, The Front Room does try to spice things up a bit by making Solange a religious fanatic who thinks God works miracles through her, and there are a few times when it seems like she might actually be right.
But the film never does anything interesting with that idea. It ends up being of no real narrative consequence, and it doesn’t play into the finale at all. In fact, it almost feels shoehorned in, so it can’t elevate the story the way the filmmakers might’ve intended it to.
What’s more, the final few minutes really cement this as a disappointingly mundane story. I’m obviously not going to give anything away, but I can say that the third act of The Front Room is surprisingly anticlimactic. The resolution of Belinda and Solange’s conflict might even be more lackluster than the story that precedes it, so when the credits began to roll, I just felt incredibly underwhelmed.
Last but not least, I want to talk about the way this film portrays Christianity. As a horror fan, I’ve seen my fair share of evil Christians in movies. Whether they’re bizarrely idiosyncratic fanatics like Margaret White in Carrie, evil churchmen like in The First Omen, or anything in between, I’ve seen it all, and even though I’m a Christian myself, I don’t mind these characters.
But I do mind seeing the entirety of the Christian faith equated with their twisted practices, and The Front Room appears to do exactly that. There are a few times when the characters talk about Solange’s odd brand of fanaticism, and whenever they do, they just call it Christianity without bothering to point out that her faith isn’t exactly mainstream.
To make matters worse, the movie also makes a clear connection between Solange’s attempts to replace Belinda and the various ways the Church has allegedly adopted symbols from other religious traditions (I say “allegedly” because the particular examples this film uses are historically dubious), and the way I see it, that’s our smoking gun. Granted, I don’t know what the filmmakers were trying to do, but it very much feels like they intended to paint all Christians as racists and laughable fanatics who just want to destroy other people’s cultures, and for obvious reasons, that really rubbed me the wrong way.
So at the end of the day, I’m sad to report that I wouldn’t recommend The Front Room. Sure, the acting in this movie is excellent, but beyond that, the experience is hollow at best. The story just isn’t very interesting, and the film’s depiction of Christianity leaves a lot to be desired (to say the least), so if you’re looking for some good new horror to watch, I suggest you look elsewhere.
The Front Room is playing in theaters right now.
