You Are Not My Mother (2021) by Kate Dolan

Director: Kate Dolan

Year: 2021

Country: Ireland

Alternate Titles: N/A

Genre: Supernatural

Plot:

Following a traumatic incident, a woman tries to reforge a relationship with her mother when she starts to act confrontational following her return, and when the dark truth about what happens is revealed rushes to save her mother from the strange entity she believes is haunting her.

Review:

For the most part, this was an okay if troublesome genre effort. Among the more likable factors with this one comes from the solid central setup that provides this with the chance to look at the effects of mental illness within an individual that is quite familiar to us. Since we get to learn the nature of their relationship from the very beginning by seeing how much they rely on each other, the mother is starting to undergo a series of bizarre personality shifts that are quite disturbing, while the daughter needs to vent to someone after being bullied by classmates. With the interplay between them establishing that there’s a history of mental health with the mother, which only gets exacerbated by the disappearance and the attempts at reconciling what happened, with the need for understanding and acceptance, even as her mother gets crazier over the course of the film, it creates a strong grounding that explains the use of localized folklore to explain everything. That gets explored nicely in the finale, where it brings up the different possible outcomes as a means of understanding what’s going on and uses it for a fiery finishing stage, giving the film some likable factors.

Aside from that, there’s little about this one that makes for a fun time. The majority of these issues are tied up in a tempo and rhythm that leaves the film struggling to build anything resembling a likable pace. Everything, from the conversations about her mother and the bizarre past she had that gets the hint across about what might have potentially happened to her to the different interactions at school with the various bullies or meeting with her grandmother trying to understand the truth about what’s going on, are played out at the kind of sluggish, dragging tempo that drains any attempt to tell its story completely dry. This is quite difficult to get a hold of the kind of scares needed to build it out even more than necessary, yet the struggle to get into this is due solely to the kind of tempo it is all played at, as the rest of this one doesn’t have much of an issue getting to the good points. Outside of this, the only other main issue here is the storyline about the bullies doing the usual sense of film bullies by resorting to outright murder attempts in the name of seeking to bully their target, which becomes troubling to understand, which impacts it, but not as much as the pacing.

Overview: ***/5

A generally likable slow-burn folk-horror effort, there’s a lot to like and just as much to dislike here, with the positives being enough to keep this down from what it could’ve been. Those with an appreciation for this style of genre feature or who aren’t bothered by the flaws here will have the most to like, while those who are turned off by these factors should heed caution.