You Are Not My Mother

A Burn For The Worse

You Are Not My Mother
Ireland 2022
Directed by Kate Dolan
Universal Pictures

Warning: Minor spoilers.

You Are Not My Mother is the feature length debut from Kate Dolan. It’s also a nicely put together slice of folk horror set on a housing estate in Dublin but, not so urban in that there’s a forest nearby, lending itself to the rural elements exploited by certain story beats of the film.

I’ll get to my one and only problem with this movie first because, I might as well get any negativity out of the way as quickly as possible. That being that the pre-credits prologue, which opens extremely strongly with a long shot of an abandoned baby in a pushchair in the middle of a road at night, the camera slowly zooming into the centre of the composition... kind of telegraphs almost everything the film is about and allows the audience (or this audience member, at least) a pretty good idea of just which strand of folk horror threat the movie will be dealing with and, kind of taking the sting out of any surprise reveals in the movie. I kinda wish that the opening would have been just alluded to in partial flashbacks at a few points in the movie rather than shown outright at the start of the film, to be honest.

That aside though, it’s a pretty good movie, centring on main protagonist, school girl Char, played by Hazel Doupe and her sometimes protagonist/sometimes antagonist mother Angela, played by Carolyn Bracken. These two are absolutely fabulous in this, as are the supporting cast. Everyone does their bit to ensure the story comes off in a pretty convincing fashion.

And it is a character piece, if anything. I particularly liked that one of the bullying classmates from Char’s school, set up as almost main villainess at first (before being superseded by someone even more ruthless), actually progresses to the point in the story where she is Char’s friend and confidant, helping her to set things right (or as far as they could be set right) by the end of the movie.

The film portrays Char’s family, as in her mother and gran, as knowing various superstitious, witchy like practices which have obviously evolved in the family for years. Char’s gran passes on this information, in one form or another, over the course o the film and, I’m surprised that more wasn’t made of a final word on Char’s lingering ‘birthmark’ because, it actually says a lot about the success, or perhaps failure, of something her grandmother was involved with in the opening sequence.

The director keeps things calm for the main part in terms of a slow sure pacing. There are some scenes which demonstrate a lot of camera movement but I think these are outnumbered by the amount of moments which are static shots or slow zooms, edited with a deftness which allows for complete clarity with an uncomplicated range of shots, keeping the creepiness of the film at a slow, simmering boil for a lot of the time, before those scenes where the camera breaks free and things ramp up for set pieces.

The tension inherent in a scene where (after Angela’s own brother has been hospitalised due to something which the audience sees but which Char doesn’t know about), Angela starts dancing inappropriately to some music in an extremely threatening and damaging manner, works so well, I believe, because of the more demure shooting style in various scenes around it. The director certainly seems to know when to lay low with the style of the mise en scene and then let fly.

There’s also a nice sense of visual poetry to the movie at certain points. One bit in particular, where the somewhat transforming presence of Angela is seen in the street during a Halloween celebration and she lets rip with a scream to chase her daughter is quite amazing. As she screams the sound is dialled down to nothing (we’ve already heard her dramatic vocalisations by this point anyway) and instead all we can hear are fireworks going off, which the camera has tilted up to contemplate for five seconds or so, teasing the audience with the absence of the main event before cutting back to the chase, so to speak. It’s nice stuff and I appreciated this approach.

What I also appreciated was the music by a composer or possibly duet or group of artists known on the end credits as Die Hexen. This would appear to be their first feature length movie too and, I have to say, I really liked this score. It’s one of those modern horror scores which almost but not quite doubles as sound design and, I thought it was great. It’s like a kind of series of low key sirens going off in the background which get racheted up or dialled down at the appropriate moments to keep things on edge, like an old whistling kettle slowly coming to the boil and then holding at various moments. It’s almost a close cousin to some of Edgard Varèse’s early works but.. yeah not quite. It’s very effective though and I would love it if this thing was released on CD at some point.

And that’s me just about done on You Are Not My Mother. I don’t think you need to be a big fan of horror films to enjoy this one (indeed, you will probably be a lot more rewarded if you didn’t go into this assuming certain things about the genre which, I have to say, it does deliver on) but I also think horror people will like this too, especially those interested in folk horror tales, which seems to be going through a bit of an engineered marketing revival at the moment. Definitely a nice little film which hits all the right notes in everything it sets out to do, I think. Take a look if you get the opportunity, would be my advice on this one.