Yahoo Lifestyle ‘The Front Room’ Review: A24’s Mean-Spirited Hagsploitation Movie Is Neither Scary Nor Funny
If we live long enough, we won’t be spared from seeing the misfortunes of old age sneak into our bodies, unmercifully deteriorating the things — like healthy hair and intact teeth — we once took for granted. A mean-spirited, gross-out hagsploitation exercise co-written by first-time directors Max and Sam Eggers (brothers of the contemporary horror master Robert Eggers, with whom Max wrote “The Lighthouse”), “The Front Room” will only be tolerable if you find those aging-related hardships — incontinence, being chief among them — spooky and funny. Otherwise, with the exception of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” Oscar nominee Kathryn Hunter’s fiercely committed performance, much of this well-designed but boring film yields a shrug.
Hunched, delirious and sporting a chewy drawl, Hunter craftily plays Solange, the nasty surprise who insinuates herself, not into someone’s body (despite constant and tedious teases, “The Front Room” isn’t a possession-themed supernatural horror), but into her stepson Norman (Andrew Burnap) and his heavily pregnant wife Belinda’s (a convincing Brandy Norwood) modest house. With a “Daughters of the Confederacy” certificate and repeated insults she casually throws Belinda’s way, Solange is an obvious racist. But what ends up rattling the young couple most about this exceedingly Jesus-centric old woman isn’t necessarily her horrendous viewpoints, but her inability to control her bladder and bowels.
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Perhaps they have a point, as Solange’s urine and feces frequently appear on various corners of their house, and the filmmaking duo isn’t afraid to show it. The smears are everywhere, even all over poor Belinda’s hands, phone and clothes. (In one scene, she stubbornly doesn’t change her soiled shirt for a ridiculously long stretch, a calculated decision that needlessly hammers on the film’s gross-out intentions.)
So why don’t they just put her in a suitable facility, you might rightly ask? That’s the deal Solange cuts them: accommodate her in their house through the final phase of her life, and her hefty inheritance will be theirs. The couple can certainly use the loot. Like Solange, their old house of deteriorating wallpapers and bare furnishings has seen better days and could use some urgent attention, realized skillfully by set decorator Lauren Crawford and production designer Mary Lena Colston. Plus, anthropology professor Belinda’s academic career prospects are sadly limited too, in a hostile field that doesn’t always prioritize the most deserving. So it makes sense to them to endure whatever inconveniences or religious fanaticisms Solange temporarily drags into their domestic bliss.
But those troubles end up being a lot more than what Belinda bargained for. This is mostly because his cowardly husband often leaves her alone in dealing with the handful Solange, who announces every incontinence accident with a loud “M-E-double-S” or an ear-splitting whistle, and walks around the house like a multi-legged insect with her two tap-tapping canes. Again, Hunter pulls off this part brilliantly, building Solange’s slimy physical and aural characteristics with impressively agile specificity.
But the film is often too juvenile and shallow, even offensive, to deserve her ambitious presence. Yes, there is a reason that the subgenre is called “hagsploitation,” which that can also be used for recent and far superior films like “X” and “Barbarian.” Here, the label gives creators the permission to exploit our inner fears of what might physically and mentally become of us (as women) in the later chapters of our lives. The problem is, “The Front Room” doesn’t do anything shrewd with this concept, settling eventually for churning our stomachs only.
Despite all the hints scattered throughout its running time (and its marketing), it doesn’t land like a real horror film either. In that, “The Front Room” severely lacks true scares, and the closest it gets to the horror genre is through the co-writers’ unclever references to the greats. So you’ll spot the “Psycho” wink as soon as Solange’s voice on the phone mutters, “Hello Norman, this is your mother.” And “Rosemary’s Baby” will also be spelled out before your eyes in capital letters when a bunch of eerie-looking white people creepily fawn over Belinda’s bump. But these nods don’t add up to much, partly because they are way too basic and unserious, and partly due to the writers’ refusal to lean into them in any meaningful way.
Instead, “The Front Room” just puts your gag reflexes to test by humiliating an old body, and tries to get away with it by making the owner of that body an actually awful mother-in-law from hell. Elsewhere, Belinda’s racial identity and the white microaggressions she is subjected to receive the same superficial treatment. There are some atmospheric Mozart and Chopin needle drops throughout, and a pair of inspired montages juxtapose the needs of Belinda’s sweet baby against Solange’s babylike demands, insinuating the hardships of postpartum and the circular nature of life. But the rewards of “The Front Room” stop there. The rest is just punishing.
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