A lonely teenager is traumatized by her mother’s volatile behavior in this impressive horror debut.
On a desolate midnight street, a baby in a pram sits alone. A young mother lies on a bed, her limbs shackled and her head veiled. A teen girl cowers in the face of bullies who threaten to set her on fire.
Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother is a 2021 Irish psychological horror film she wrote and directed. Char (Hazel Doupe) is a young lady at odds with her grandma Rita (Ingrid Craigie) when her mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken) goes absent for a short time before reappearing with a completely different personality.
At the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, the film premiered in the Midnight Madness stream, where it was selected first runner up for the People’s Choice Award: Midnight Madness.
These are just a handful of the horrific visuals in Kate Dolan’s enthralling debut film, “You Are Not My Mother,” a spine-inducing blend of Irish mythology and family secrets. The picture hovers nervously about Char (Hazel Doupe), a reclusive and tormented girl who’s growing increasingly frightened by her mother, Angela’s, strange conduct (Carolyn Bracken).
When Angela vanishes, only to reappearance the next day without explanation, the intrigue surrounding her whereabouts is only heightened by the nonchalant attitude of her boyfriend.
“You Are Not My Mother,” set just outside Dublin during the run-up to Halloween, leaves most of its supernatural thrust to ambiguity and allusion, instead of focusing on Char’s reactions to her mother’s horrific change.
Doupe is devastating, pale-faced, and wide-eyed; yet, Bracken is the more difficult character to play, swinging from antagonistic to loving, stern to vulnerable, enthusiastic to near-catatonic.
She steadily transforms a simple dance into a terrifying act of predation in one astonishing moment set to Joe Dolan’s toe-tapper “You’re Such a Good Looking Woman.”
“You Are Not My Mother” is imaginative and eerie, demonstrating how terrifying — and stigmatizing — a parent’s mental illness can be to a kid. She’s trapped in a stifling suburb, where steel-colored sky press down on crouching rooftops (the beautifully evocative phrase “trapped in a suffocating suburb” comes to mind).
The cast of the You are not my Mother:
- Hazel Doupe as Char
- Carolyn Bracken as Angela
- Paul Reid as Aaron
- Jade Jordan as Ms. Devlin
- Ingrid Craigie as Rita
- Jordanne Jones as Suzanne
- Katie White as Kelly
- Aoife Spratt as Officer Jenny
- Lucie Doran as Young Char
- Martin O’Sullivan as Frank
- Miriam Devitt as TV sitcom – Witch
- Florence Adebambo as Amanda
- Colin Peppard as Jamie
On the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, 86 percent of 22 critics have given it a favorable grade, with an average of 7.50/10. “Smartly scary, You Are Not My Mother connects with a lot of thought-provoking subjects without compromising chills,” says the website’s consensus.
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