Long before the abrupt, not-that-shocking and obvious anti-climax of the horror thriller “The Front Room,” the viewer may feel entitled to mutter, “So what is this really about?”
A dark, serio-comic tussle with post partum depression? An unsubtle poke at shifting generational racial dynamics in America? An anthropological poke at Christianity’s derivative primitivism? A scatological satire of the horrors of elder care?
Or is it a make-work project for two siblings of Robert Eggers (“The Witch,” “The Lighthouse”), lesser lights given the chance to extend the family brand across the landscape of “cerebral horror?”
Whatever one concludes about all that, “The Front Room,” about an ancient, racist Southern white stepmother (Kathryn Hunter) who comes to live with and attempt to dominate a young professional couple (Brandy Norwood, Andrew Burnap) expecting their first baby, never escapes the pall of “much ado about not very much.”
Hunter, of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and “Poor Things,” is a Southern-fried fury as Solange, the estranged stepmother who parlays her wealth and new widowhood into the home of academic anthropoligist Belinda and lawyer Norman. There is unstated menace in every drawled “Ba-lin-DER” and perhaps-post-stroke slurred “The Bible says ‘We are the house that the spirit lives in” and “Do I DESERVE any tenderness?”
We quickly decide that Belinda, showing compassion, has talked fearful, leery Norman into a deal with the Devil letting his fundamentalist stepmother in her. All that’s left is laying out the field of conflict and pairing up the foes.
Norwood, a singer, former child actress and horror veteran (“I Still Know What You Did Last Summer”) plays the moral high ground with a modest ferocity and holds her own in most scenes. But this script, based on a Susan Hill story, doesn’t have much for her to play other than threatened wife and discounted and wronged and underestimated young Black mother and “adjunct” professor.
And “holding her own” with Hunter is about as close to interesting as this character and performance get.
Belinda and Norman have just moved into a big arts & crafts home, decorating it for their new baby and, it turns out, hoping for the best as their last one barely survived birth. Word comes that Norman’s father is dying, and he’s not eager to visit him. But at Belinda’s insistence, they make it to the funeral.
That’s where the veiled, two-caned menace that is Solange is introduced. She is a fundamentalist force in her speaking-in-tongues/laying-on-of-the-hands Church of Light. Her “Holy Spirit power” shows itself in realizing — or correctly guessing — that Belinda is having a little girl, and that they had a baby that they lost.
With the reading of the will revealing Norman’s late father’s wish that he take his stepmother in, and her drawled insistence that “doctor says I shouldn’t live by my lonesome,” Belinda insists they bring her home.
And that’s where the trouble begins. Cooking, decorating — Belinda’s “many faces and forms of ‘the goddess'” academic specialty fills the house with African, Asian and MesoAmerican statuary — and even the name of the coming child are up for criticism.
“‘Fern?’ That a PLANT growin’ in there? I thought you-all were supposed to have more interesting names!”
Belinda doesn’t need to hear the word “uppity” or see the Daughters of the Confederacy certificate to know what “you all” means. She’s dealing with a racist, or at the very least a tactless relic of a much older generation, one who labels her white supremacist upbringing “HAIR-tage.”
With her Jesus fish necklace, speaking in tongues and evil SIDE eye, Solange is a threat. Did her mumbo jumbo induce Belinda’s labor?
And once the baby is home, Belinda’s anger and fear grow as real or imagined threats and demands on her time pile-up thanks to the unwelcome guest covering their mortgage.
Is Solange trying to “take over” and “REPLACE ME” as “mother? Why can’t a PhD hire somebody to clean-up the incontinent and demanding Solange, blowing a whistle to summon help after every bodily function “M-E-S-S” she’s made?
The script introduces dismissive under-appreciation at her college gig into Belinda’s thinking, and suspicion that her husband’s bond with this crone is even creepier than he lefts on.
But co-writers/directors Sam and Max Eggers go for symbolic nightmares and simple toilet-accidents for shocks and wicked sneers that only Belinda sees to set us up for something more fraught, fundamental and final than their movie delivers.
Burnap is barely a presence in their tug of war tale, and Norwood, while playing a sympathetic character with a spine, never has a scene that seals the deal on the stakes in all this. Belinda is not “bonding” with her baby, but there’s nothing here that makes that matter or us care.
Hunter’s performance is a marvel of gerentology, but the many troubling subtexts of her character are barely addressed. Racist “HAIR-tage,” fundamentalist beliefs and practices and the indignities of old age are merely introduced as subjects for mockery by the “uppity YAN-kees” who made this.
And that just won’t do.
Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, scatological images
Cast: Brandy Norwood, Andrew Burnap and Kathryn Hunter.
Credits Scripted and directed by Max Eggers and Sam Eggers, based on a short story by Susan Hill. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:34
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