‘The Front Room’ Review
There’s no shortage of horror movies that use the elderly as a means of terrifying audiences with heightened depictions of gross behavior or a disconnect from reality. Films like Ti West’s X, Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit are recent examples that play with the creep factor to humorous effect. While playful in their depictions of an older generation, they still tend to give the character more depth than just cheap genre thrills. With Max and Sam Eggers’ feature directorial debut, The Front Room, they’ve put all their effort into crafting a memorably insufferable character who consumes the film and puts every other idea on the back burner. Placed entirely on the shoulders of Kathryn Hunter’s delirious performance, The Front Room is a fun but exhausting horror film that struggles to win out against the performance of its antagonist.
Adapted from the short story of the same name by Susan Hill, The Front Room very quickly sets itself up to perhaps be a different type of horror film than one might expect. What begins as a classic set-up to some evil nightmare waiting to unfold just as suddenly swerves into a comedy of horrors. As expectant parents Belinda (Brandy Norwood) and Norman (Andrew Burnap) find their finances unstable as the birth of their daughter is looming, they run into an opportunity they cannot pass up: take in Norman’s estranged stepmother, Solange (Kathryn Hunter), and let her help financially. However, the money soon comes with many strings, and she takes residence within the baby’s room, begins pitching new names for the baby, and preys on Belinda’s doubts about her own ability to be a mother.
In the casting of Kathryn Hunter, the film becomes almost unbearably funny as she embodies the most heightened depiction of an in-law ever. As Solange makes herself at home, slowly getting into the head of Belinda while Norman tries to land a profitable case as a public defender, Hunter turns the character into a puppet for a deranged performance. There’s psychological and gross-out horror throughout The Front Room, but it’s Hunter who escalates the tension with a presence that makes every scene she walks into both hilarious and terrifying. From Belinda’s perspective, Solange’s presence in her house becomes just as exhausting for the audience because no matter how the scene begins, you know it won’t end well for Belinda. It’s the weaponization of Hunter that makes the potentially exciting return of Brandy to horror far less enticing. The film’s tone meshes more with Hunter’s performance than Brandy’s, and it becomes almost impossible to talk about anything other than Hunter. Quite simply, she becomes a vortex that consumes the entire film.
There’s a sense that The Eggers Brothers have other ideas they want to dive into through the screenplay’s inclusion of race, religion, motherhood, and the elderly, but it remains insubstantial by the time The Front Room winds down. Most of the time, it’s played off to amplify the creepiness of Solange, again aiding Hunter’s performance with more material. It’s worth noting that The Front Room was produced by A24, which has released many successful horror films that combine the unsettling and the absurd to craft memorable experiences. This includes The Lighthouse, co-written by Max Eggers and his other brother, Robert. That film also had a unique blend of horror, drama, and comedy to create a suffocating atmosphere due to being cooped up in a single location with an unsettling person. The Front Room is not dissimilar from this. Still, it is far more hilarious than disturbing and is more of a parody of similar horror films than a compelling horror/comedy hybrid.
The Front Room is most surprising in its somewhat accurate depiction of life immediately after having a child. There are some quibbles, but ultimately, it showcases an environment where stability is the name of the game, and anything foreign feels like a potential threat to the child's safety. Most of that comes through in how The Eggers Brothers turn Belinda into someone willing to make concessions until Solange’s behavior becomes impossible to ignore. The downside is that it frustrates the audience by how every character behaves around Solange. As mentioned, she’s a vortex, and it turns every character into fodder for her antics. While the exciting element on paper might be seeing The Eggers Brothers direct a feature-length film after the wildly successful run their other brother has had since 2015’s The Witch, or Brandy’s return to horror films since 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, The Front Room doesn’t leave much room for anyone other than Hunter.
A delightfully campy evil permeates The Front Room. The comedy is juvenile with its extreme amounts of pettiness and bodily fluids, but it’s also terribly repetitive to the point where it becomes difficult to discern what an audience is supposed to get out of the film. The performances are fine, except for Kathryn Hunter, who essentially takes control of the film and molds it into her own theatrical production. The score is eerie and unsettling from Marcelo Zarvos, but it’s juxtaposed against Solange’s gross-out humor and over-the-top antics. It’s a mess when trying to examine it beyond a surface-level approach. The Front Room seems like it wants to walk this fine line between comedy and horror, but the film works as well as it does because Hunter takes it entirely into comedic territory and never looks back. It’s not a great movie, but The Front Room is fascinating as an example of how an actor can chew through every scene and leave nothing on the bone.
