In a North Dublin housing estate, Char’s mother goes missing. When she returns, Char is determined to uncover the truth of her disappearance and unearth her family’s dark secrets.
I was very excited to get the chance to view director Kate Dolan’s Irish horror-thriller, “You Are Not My Mother.” I had heard about it a while back, and because it is set in North Dublin, where I was born and raised, I was eager to see how Dolan could turn my hometown into an atmospheric supernatural thriller. While the film’s first two acts are genuinely creepy and, at times, unsettling, it is in its final act that the narrative begins to disintegrate slowly, which is a pity because, with a more robust outcome, this could have been a modern masterpiece.
Char (Hazel Doupe) is your typical Irish teen who lives in a North Dublin housing estate with her mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken) and grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie). She is bullied at school regularly and pretty much keeps to herself at home, but one day after her mother goes missing and then inexplicably returns in the middle of the night, her entire life begins to change. When her mother starts acting peculiarly, performing feats that are near impossible for a human being to achieve, she turns to her grandmother, who feels that Angela is not her daughter but rather a changeling, who, according to Irish folklore, is a fairy that has been left in place of a human stolen by the fairies.
On Halloween, Char’s uncle, Aaron (Paul Reid), drops by their house to check on his sister Angela but mysteriously succumbs to a seizure and ends up in the hospital. Rita informs Char the only way to banish the changeling and get her mother back is by putting it in a fire, then the changeling has no choice but to return to the fairy world and allow its human counterpart to return. With nightfall fast approaching and an abundance of bonfires ready to light up the neighborhood, the changeling begins to metamorphose into something grotesque, and Char must figure out a way to somehow lure it to a nearby fire to extinguish its life force or risk losing her mother forever.
I love that the story includes references to Irish folklore and mythology, precisely that of the changeling. While its form exists in many different cultures worldwide, the Irish iteration is a welcome addition to big-screen storytelling. However, the issue I had with the final act has nothing to do with the mythological element of the story; rather, it pertains to the characters and their actions. In slasher flicks, you always get the characters who do stupid things, like walking into a dark basement alone or going outside at night by themselves after hearing a bloodcurdling scream; these are the quintessential characters that horror films need to move the story along, without them, we wouldn’t have a story.
In skilfully executed psychological narratives such as “You Are Not My Mother,” where the central focus is more on the characters and their synergy with the sequence of events transpiring around them, they are not part of the conventional horror tropes that we have become accustomed to, characters who are ill-advised and who bring their demise upon themselves through their idiotic actions or lack thereof, here, they can discern when things go wrong, or someone starts acting out of character. They are smart, and they know when to run. Over the story’s progression, Char sees her mother slowly transform into something inhuman. Initially, she refuses to believe it, but the circumstances that continue to present themselves force her to realize her situation.
Towards the end, when Rita manages to tie Angela to the bed and inform Char that it is a changeling and not her mother, she flat-out refuses to believe her, despite everything she has seen with her own two eyes, and unties the entity from the bed, causing it to unleash even more havoc and chaos in and around the house. This turn of events completely took me out of the movie and placed it into slasher flick territory, where the protagonist, who up to this point had displayed acute and intuitive instincts, performs an action that feels disproportionate to everything that that has come before. I found it hard to believe that she would act this way, despite having endured everything that has been presented to us thus far.
It’s sad when one tiny element can be overlooked in favor of advancing the story, yet this very act is what puts an end to an absorbing and sometimes frightening narrative. Overall, the acting is top-notch, while cinematographer Narayan Van Maele imbues the film with striking and nightmarish imagery. In her feature-film directorial debut, director Kate Dolan most certainly knows how to tell a story, visually and aesthetically, and while I felt let down by the film’s finale, I eagerly await her next feature.
In Theaters and On-Demand Friday, March 25th.
