You Are Not My Mother, 2021.
Directed by Kate Dolan.
Starring Hazel Doupe, Paul Reid, Carolyn Bracken, Jade Jordan and Ingrid Craigie.
SYNOPSIS:
A teenage girl’s mother goes missing after suffering a mental breakdown, only to return a changed woman, and not for the better.
Irish folklore is a rich tapestry of tales and traditions dating back centuries, full of wonder and mystery. Writer/director Kate Dolan’s debut feature You Are Not My Mother is a horror/drama that taps into that mythology, bringing ancient magics into a contemporary setting against a backdrop of a family in the grip of mental illness. However, it only taps into that mythology rather than explore it fully, and that is to the movie’s detriment.
The movie opens with an unsettling scene of a woman placing a baby onto a pile of leaves and wood in a dark forest and setting fire to it in a ritual that is not made clear. Fast forward a few years and said baby is teenager Char (Hazel Doupe), a girl with a burn scar on her face and who has the double tragedy of witnessing her mother’s failing mental health and having to deal with school bullies who have targeted her due to her family having a reputation for being a little different. After a school run that sees Char take the wheel of the car to avoid an accident, mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken) disappears, leaving Char in the care of her granny Rita (Ingrid Craigie), who we discover was the woman burning the baby at the beginning of the movie.
Things take a weirder turn when Angela returns home, seeming a little happier than she was before she left but also acting a little weird around Char. Granny seems to know something is up, and as the bullying against Char intensifies Angela intervenes, bringing things to a head on Halloween as secrets are revealed and Char has to accept that the woman claiming to be her mother is not only not her mother but not human at all.
A barely disguised metaphor for mental health and the wellbeing of a mother-daughter relationship, You Are Not My Mother is a slow-burning drama for most of its running time, revealing a family dynamic – there is no father figure but Angela’s brother Aaron (Paul Reid) provides a minimal male influence – that excludes Char having many, if any, friends as outsiders seem to be frowned upon. Like most of the details that the movie throws in, this angle is never really explored to any great length, suggesting but never outright saying so, and if Kate Dolan had gone a little deeper with what we have to figure out for ourselves the movie wouldn’t feel quite so underwhelming as a whole.
The folklore that the story weaves into its narrative is quite compelling, but aside from giving you the basics via a few lines from Rita to Char, it never really hits the creepy highs that the setup and oppressive atmosphere suggest, so that when things take a proper turn in the final 20 minutes there is very little to get scared of or excited over as the budgetary limitations and scant nature of the plot means that what you are seeing is not as hard-hitting as what you’ve built up in your heads already.
But what the movie does have in its favour is a wonderfully doom-laden atmosphere and some strong performances, especially from Hazel Doupe as Char, who brings a lot more to the role than was likely written on the page. With inevitable comparisons to The Wicker Man and, amongst others, Candyman, You Are Not My Mother doesn’t quite have the substance behind the ideas it conveys, spending little time building up any relationships between Char, Angela and Rita, and making you have to fill in the blanks yourself when it comes to the why’s and how’s, but the sense of foreboding that Kate Dolan crafts is incredible and there is just about enough here to mark her out as a filmmaker with ideas, if not the means to execute them fully just yet.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★/ Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
