‘The Front Room’ Review: Brandy vs. Kathryn Hunter in Dubious Geriatric Horror

Blood may be thicker than bile, but it’s damn near impossible to deliver a bona fide fright classic fresh out the gate, even if you’re closely related to one of the genre’s leading torchbearers. With The Front Room, Max and Sam Eggers (younger brothers of Robert Eggers, director of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman) strive to lay claim to their own little corner of the horror genre, mixing light surrealism and gross-out humor for a blackly comic, ill-mannered romp whose parts are ultimately more compelling than the arthritic whole.

Anthropology professor Belinda (Brandy) isn’t looking forward to being a mother. Haunted by the stillbirth of her first child, watching herself being frozen out of her university job, and struggling to pay the mortgage, she and her public defender husband, Norman (Andrew Burnap), could use a little divine intervention. It seemingly arrives in the form of Norman’s estranged, bible-thumping stepmother, Solange (Kathryn Hunter), who, after the death of his father, offers the couple a hefty inheritance should they take her in for what remains of her life.

Wary but in no position to turn down the deal, the couple moves Solange into the nursery of their future child, and from which she quickly begins to exert her chaotic influence over the house. Believing herself possessed by the holy spirit, Solange’s fire-and-brimstone sense of superstition comes into conflict with Belinda’s modern, scientific understanding of the world, leading to an unholy clash between mother-to-be and the mother of all bad mother-in-laws.

It’s perhaps unfair to compare Max and Sam Eggers’ work to their elder brother’s more confident and fully formed style of scare-making, but The Front Room ultimately feels like a stronger showing for its production team than the writers-directors themselves. Cinematographer Ava Berkofsky brings out the warm browns and hellfire oranges of the plot-relevant home and photographs Brandy and Hunter with unusual care and richness. This is appropriate, as the film is primarily a showcase for the duo, especially Hunter, a preternaturally gifted physical artist with a menacing presence that outweighs her small stature.

Armed with twin canes that thump like giant insect legs and an asthmatic laugh that falls out with all the joy and ease of the unsealing of a sepulcher, Solange is an unstoppable force that strains the foundation of a film barely built to contain her. Brandy initially seems to be outmatched by Hunter, but her character eventually manages to give as good as she gets. Still, it’s hard not to wish that she was able to put the pedal to the metal a bit more throughout.

The film is an overstuffed brew of themes—class, financial instability, faith, motherhood, and rationalism—with a supernatural thread that goes nowhere. But its big sticking point is racial animus: Belinda is married to a white man and deals with microaggressions in her workplace, while Solange is a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy. These strains come to a head in a dinner scene that, while amusing, feels like a lot of hand-wringing on the part of creators who know they have to address the hooded elephant that they themselves dragged into the room but are too petrified to say anything about. The timorous handling of this conversation and its lingering implications leaves The Front Room feeling thematically constipated.

If there’s any food for thought in The Front Room, it’s the ongoing portrayal of old folks in the A24 catalog. In the hagsploitation tradition of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, your mileage with The Front Room will vary depending on how entertaining or offensive you find its aged antagonist. It’s become something of a meme that the studio always seems to present the elderly body as disturbing and gross, and The Front Room triples down, tickling viewers with a mean-spirited gauntlet of geriatric bad behavior that’s good for shits and giggles, if not much else.