Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kate Dolan
Starring: Hazel Doupe, Carolyn Bracken, Ingrid Craigie, Paul
Reid, Jordanne Jones, Jade Jordan
Lots of horror movies, and a few non-horror movies, have been set
around Halloween. But surprisingly few have been about Halloween. John
Carpenter's
Halloween
may be the best movie set at Halloween, but the best movie about
Halloween is its black sheep sequel
Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Sure, Carpenter's film brilliantly captures the atmosphere of October
31st in a contemporary American suburb, but for its teenage and child
protagonists, Halloween is just about scoring candy, dressing up and
getting laid. In Halloween III the series looks back to
the roots of Halloween in Celtic mythology, to the feast of Samhain,
when the doors between our world and others are temporarily
opened.
In Irish writer-director Kate Dolan's highly impressive feature
debut You Are Not My Mother (which is actually being
released under the title 'Samhain' in some territories, though oddly not
in Ireland), those doors open once again, and the question gradually
becomes whether something malevolent has passed into our world or
whether someone is in danger of exiting through said portal.
In 16-year-old Char (Hazel Doupe), we get a classic young horror
heroine. We find her dealing with earthly troubles like being bullied
and worrying about her mother, Angela (Carolyn Bracken), who
lives in such a state of depression that she struggles to get out of bed
in the morning. The mother and daughter live with Char's grandmother,
Rita (Ingrid Craigie), who believes in "the old ways," curing her
ailments with poultices and weaving crosses to ward off evil
spirits.
One morning Angela disappears, returning a couple of days later.
Something's different about her though. She seems to be forcing a chirpy
demeanour, which reaches an over-the-top apogee when she tries to force
her daughter to dance along to Joe Dolan in the living room (a gag that
may pass over the heads of non-Irish viewers). She now writes with her
left-hand. She's secretly throwing up her food at night. She attacks one
of her daughter's bullies before submerging herself under water in a
local river for an unfeasible amount of time.
The body-snatching horror sub-genre has evolved from functioning as an
allegory for dehumanisation through totalitarianism in the 1950s to an
exploration of urban alienation in the '70s and now in recent films it's
been used as a metaphor for mental health issues. Even if no
supernatural element were introduced to
You Are Not My Mother, the idea of a young girl having to live with a mother she no longer
recognises is disturbing enough in itself.
But refreshingly in this era of "elevated horror", Dolan revels in her
film's supernatural elements once they're introduced, going full-on
monster movie in a final act that's so refreshing in its ballsiness that
it may be a little jarring for more jaded and cynical viewers. Dolan's
film begins as something of a companion to another recent Irish horror,
Lee Cronin's
The Hole in the Ground. In Cronin's film a mother begins to suspect her young son has been
replaced by some evil entity, while here that dynamic has been reversed.
You Are Not My Mother is clearly influenced by classic
American sci-fi horror, along with the gritty young-women-in-peril
thrillers of late '60s/early '70s British cinema, but it's distinctively
Irish in both its mythology and its themes.
Over the past decade a lot of new genre filmmakers of my generation
have emerged from the UK and Ireland, and I can tell they grew up
watching the same movies as myself (we only had a handful of TV channels
but horror movies were a programming staple). Dolan's film might be the
first time I've seen a filmmaker who not only ingested similar pop
culture programming as myself, but also likely shared my childhood
fascination with Samhain. Dolan cleverly finds a way to tie her American
and British movie influences in with Irish mythology, weaving them
together as tightly as a St. Brigid's cross. If you grew up in Ireland
listening to tales of Samhain, you'll be thrilled to see such mythology
make its way onto the big screen, though you may ask why it's taken so
long for an Irish filmmaker to exploit their rich culture in such a
way.
But even more so than its use of Celtic mythology, what really makes
You Are Not My Mother a distinctively Irish horror movie
is how it explores that national Irish pastime of living in denial and
ignoring problems until they explode in your face. This manifests subtly
in the background, with the central characters living in a home with
dripping taps and a front door that needs fixing. In the foreground it
more ominously takes shape in how Char can clearly see something isn't
right with her mother but fails to act, relying on a misplaced hope that
everything will work out in the end, or as we say in Ireland "Ah sure,
it'll be grand." Dolan also seems to hint at Ireland's denial of its
Pagan past, with council workers constantly dismantling bonfires in the
background. In her relationship with a bullying classmate, there's a
suggestion that Char may be a closeted lesbian. For Irish viewers
familiar with how we let our problems brew until they rise to the
surface, You Are Not My Mother is a powder keg of tension.
As it reaches its climax, we're no longer sure if it really will be
grand.
