Emily Hampshire learns that motherhood can be a right horror, but Film Brain says this is so dark you can hardly even see it.
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00:00Emily Hampshire finds out that being a parent can be a real mother in the horror film Mom.
00:05Hampshire and her husband Francois Arnaud have just had a baby named Alex,
00:09but she quickly starts struggling to take care of their child,
00:12and starts seeing visions of an older version of Alex aged eight.
00:15But is she losing her mind, or is it the house?
00:18If there's a main positive to Mom, it's Emily Hampshire,
00:21as the Schitt's Creek star absolutely commits to an emotionally demanding role
00:25that she makes unsettlingly plausible.
00:27The film taps vividly into postpartum depression,
00:30and the anxiety of feeling like you're not a good mother,
00:32and that you're not connecting with your child, escalating into paranoia.
00:36That makes it quite a tough film to watch at times,
00:39especially because the near constant sounds of babies crying,
00:42which puts you in the mindset of the main character.
00:45However, this is also very familiar ground for horror films,
00:48especially post Babadook, and for me the main issue of Mom
00:51is that it escalates so quickly that it hardly has anywhere to go.
00:55By just 30 minutes in, Hampshire is at the point where her behaviour
00:58is actively dangerous and disassociating from reality,
01:02but no one thinks to intervene until far too late,
01:04and people just keep leaving her alone in the house,
01:07as if that's going to make her better.
01:09So the only way to escalate the story is to go darker and darker,
01:13and the result is more depressing than scary in spite of the loud jump scares.
01:18And then it flies off the rails in the third act
01:20on its way to a fairly easy to guess ending.
01:23And speaking of dark, the colour grading is horrifically murky,
01:27to the point where I literally couldn't see anything
01:29that was happening in most of the night scenes,
01:31well, apart from the watermark that was at the top of my screener.
01:34So yeah, this is a film that is too dark in every meaning of the phrase.