"You Are Not My Mother" a familiar if still creepy changeling/mental health horror film

You Are Not My Mother (2022)

The Irish horror film “You Are Not My Mother” is not only about a mythical changeling, but it taps into a subtext that’s real and identifiable: mental illness. What if a loved one suddenly stopped being themselves? It is a familiar question that writer-director Kate Dolan raises for her directorial feature debut, and yet, Dolan mines plenty of vividly creepy horror and sufficient emotional resonance from such difficult subject matter to keep it from feeling stale.


The film puts us on the edge right off the top with the haunting shot of a crying baby in a stroller in the middle of a neighborhood street at night. Two women seem to be having an argument in the nearest house, and the scene proceeds to become bolder and even more upsetting, as one of the women takes the baby into the woods, flips through an occult book of spells, and sets the child within a fiery circle. That facially scarred baby then grows up to be intelligent teenager Char (Hazel Doupe), who faces the torment of her peers at school for her birthmark. She lives in North Dublin with her gout-suffering grandmother, Rita (Ingrid Craigie), as well as her mother, Angela (Carolyn Bracken), who doesn’t get out of bed much to even go to the store to have food in the house. One rare morning, Angela gets out of bed to drive Char to school, but something happens after Angela tells her daughter, “I can’t do this anymore.” Walking home, Char finds Angela’s car abandoned in a field (albeit with a bag of groceries in the driver’s seat) and no sign of her mother. Missing for 48 hours, Angela comes back in the middle of the night, but she’s different somehow. She’s cooking dinner, dancing to music, and expressing how she wants to go away for the weekend with just Char. Something wicked is happening, but can Angela be saved?


Punctuated by unsettling folkloric horror moments, “You Are Not My Mother” is more of a muted and measured coming-of-age drama (which should not be equated to being dull). Even if it doesn’t quite have the same tragic punch in its wrap-up as it does in getting there, the film remains compelling. While the past of Char and her mother’s relationship feels a little undercooked on the page, we are still able to fill in the blanks that something has clearly been lost over the years and especially now. Char is forced to grow up, taking on household responsibilities, while Angela is perpetually in “one of her down moods" even before an imposter enters her body. Hazel Doupe brings a quiet strength to the (understandably) sullen Char, and Carolyn Bracken deftly manages the vulnerability and roller-coaster moods of Angela without camping it up or getting too hysterical.


Though it becomes abundantly clear that an otherworldly evil has taken over Angela's body, "You Are Not My Mother" does play with the notion that possibly Char could be an unreliable narrator of sorts or developing stress on her own mental health. Nighttime imagery, like Char catching her mother nonchalantly stuffing her whole arm down her throat in the bathroom in the middle of the night, is effective, as is Angela's unpredictable dance in the living room that turns horrifying. Once the monster inside Angela is slowly shedding its husk and Char confronts her on Halloween night as fireworks go off, director Dolan drops out the sound of a cry that “Angela” lets out, and it’s chilling. Up against a few excellent mother-daughter horror dramas (like "Relic" and "Pyewacket") and some solid changeling films (like "The Hole in the Ground" and "The Wretched") in the last five years, "You Are Not My Mother" still holds its own through the grounded performances and the controlled pall of dreadful mood Dolan achieves.


Grade: B -


Magnet Releasing is releasing “You Are Not My Mother” (93 min.) in theaters and on demand on March 25, 2022.

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