The Front Room

Judging by the feature debut of Max and Sam Eggers, The Front Room, it seems that their elder and more famous brother Robert, of The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman fame, inherited most of the family's talent for filmmaking. It makes one wonder if the production house that, over the course of last decade, has become synonymous with so-called “elevated genre” movies would have stood behind such a poorly drawn-out and profoundly misguided project if Max and Sam carried a different last name?

The idea behind The Front Room is simple enough: a financially struggling couple that expects a baby takes an offer from husband’s widowed stepmother to support her for the rest of her life in return for her paying off their mortgage debt and bequeathing everything to them. Soon enough, it turns out that the God-fearing, old-fashioned Southern lady Solange (Kathryn Hunter) is a stepmother(-in-law) from hell and a manipulative, fundamentalist, racist bitch who enjoys pitting her absent-minded stepson Norman (Andrew Burnap, giving a one-note performance) and his Black wife Belinda (Brandy Norwood, trying to channel some deeper emotions) against each other in the eternal power-struggle that could be titled “who’s the master of the house”.

The plot would suffice for a pilot of a raunchy sitcom, or maybe a warmer and more family-friendly “dramedy” series in which our characters would learn to live together and respect each other's differences, both genre- and format-wise. However, the Eggers bros and their co-writer Susan Hill have conjured something entirely different – a psychological thriller with barely enough slips to the realm of dark fantasy to qualify it as a “light” brand of a horror movie, while still trying to milk some laughs from the mother-in-law trope and the running joke of her incontinence that proves to be quite deliberate. In the end, it works on neither level in the feature format, since it lacks proper tension to serve as a genre film, just as much it lacks intelligent humour to pass as a comedy.

The trouble starts with the poorly written characters. Norman is so obsessed with his work and clients, which is understandable, given that Belinda is in-between academic jobs due to the pregnancy, that he barely registers the power-struggle at home, although he is the one who warned his good-willing, but naive wife about the nature of his stepmom. It leaves Burnap with little to do aside from “daydreaming” in the role and occasionally getting into a verbal argument with no real zest. Brandy Norwood fares a bit better as Belinda, a character envisioned as a cross between a vessel to deliver the generic academic left-wing attitude on topics such as racism, colonialism, religion and heritage, and a “fresh” mother who has to balance caring for an infant daughter with caring for the needy and possibly evil old woman.

The character of Solange is also roughly sketched as well, for instance we have to accept that she is both racist and a bad person without questioning if she a bad person because she is racist or is it the other way round. However, Kathryn Hunter at least has a blast playing the trope of the mother-in-law-from-hell. It is safe to assume that much of her performance, such as her raspy voice and a certain way of pronouncing and accenting words, including Belinda’s name, comes from her gut-feeling rather than the script. Noting that the elements that could be attached to her interpretation of the character, such as the striking sound design that complements her voice and the colour palette of warm yellows and browns, quickly morphing into hellfire orange in Ava Berkofsky’s cinematography, are also the highlights of the film, the engagement of the veteran actress serves almost as a saving grace.

However, the final impression is that the thin, schlocky and undercooked film with an identity crisis outstays its welcome by far even at a merciful 94 minutes. Arguably, The Front Room could have been a killer short, even despite such basic characterisation. Or maybe exactly because of it, since different formats operate by different rules of craft. But the ambition drew the Eggers brothers to stretch it to feature length, no matter how thinly.