\u201cMother of Flies,\u201d about a father and daughter who get tangled up with a faith healer in a remote woodland area, is a family movie, but not in the way the phrase is usually used. It\u2019s a nightmare parable about mortality, grief, faith, and the fragility of the flesh, made by one of the most fascinating filmmaking teams in American cinema, the Adams-Poser family.<\/p>\n
The operation consists of four people: the father, John Adams, and the Mother, Toby Poser, both actors, and their daughters, Lulu and Zelda Adams. They direct, write, edit, and shoot as a team while they\u2019re performing on camera. I have only seen a couple of their many films, \u201cThe Deeper You Dig\u201d and \u201cHellbender.\u201d Both struck me more or less as this one did: not quite my jam, for reasons that might not matter to other people, but clearly the product of talented people who\u2019ve formed a hive-mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cMother of Flies\u201d has an opening credits sequence that\u2019s both sensual and vile. That you can\u2019t quite tell what\u2019s going on makes it more effective. There\u2019s blood, viscera, mud, slime, perhaps some other recognizable fluids. The ground is gnarled and irregular, suggestive of the roots of an ancient, old tree and a pile of corpses in a war zone. A naked person\u2019s gore-slathered back is seen from above, raising and lowering itself, or thrusting at something beneath it. Tightly framed shots of a woman moaning and writhing evoke sexual ecstasy, the final stretch of labor before childbirth, and a body reacting to either the first hit of a powerful narcotic or an agonizing withdrawal from it. Aficionados of oil paintings from earlier centuries may be reminded of Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco Goya, Jusepe de Rivera<\/a>, and other artists know for their depictions of Hell. <\/p>\n You won\u2019t understand the point of those images until you\u2019re deep into the story, which is about a young woman named Mickey (Zelda Adams) who travels with her father, Jake (John Adams), to a remote woodland house to meet a healer named Solvieg (Tony Poser). Solvieg is plainly defined for the audience as some kind of mystic \u2014 a witch or sorceress \u2014 before the father and daughter have even met her. The duo hopes that Solvieg can heal Mickey, a terminal cancer patient who has exhausted all the treatment options offered by modern medicine. <\/p>\n Solvieg speaks in everything but straightforward sentences. She monologues and recites scripture or incantations. Often she\u2019ll launch into what sounds like a parody (intentional or non-) of the \u201cgreatest hits\u201d of 19th-century English poetry featured in textbooks. Sometimes you can barely understand what she\u2019s saying or why she\u2019s saying it that way. Yoda would ask her to bring it down a notch. <\/p>\n But she\u2019s confident in her powers and demands that the father and daughter submit completely to her process, which is pre-technological. Their diet consists of mushrooms and leaves. There are no bathrooms in the house, so they have to take care of business as their forager ancestors did. It\u2019s as if we\u2019re seeing an account of life in a cult with one leader and just two members.<\/p>\n The movie serves up striking visuals. Solvieg\u2019s house is covered by thick layers of vines. There\u2019s so much vegetation encrusting the property that it\u2019s impossible to tell where the vines end and the house begins. Solvieg is incapable of a non-dramatic entrance. She\u2019s often silhouetted or glimpsed in half-light, framed by doorways or tree trunks. Mickey immediately begins experiencing visions\u2014maybe hallucinations, maybe supernatural events; we can\u2019t be sure at first. Lying in bed, she looks up at the ceiling and sees a pulpy, fleshy thing manifest itself and open up. It\u2019s an orifice, but you can\u2019t decide what kind because it keeps evolving.<\/p>\n And yes, as the title suggests, there are flies. Lots and lots of flies. If you tried to make a definitive list of movies with swarms of flies in them, you\u2019d need to include this movie, which is up there with \u201cExorcist II: The Heretic\u201d and the original \u201cThe Amityville Horror.\u201d As the movie goes on, there are more sequences of intense violence, including one reminiscent of the over-the-top stories that circulated during the 1980s and \u201990s hysteria over day care centers<\/a> in the United States: ritual abuse, disfigurement, and torture, babies hacked out of their mothers\u2019 bellies.<\/p>\n There isn\u2019t a shot that isn\u2019t meticulously created, lovingly fussed over, and suitable for framing. In an era of often slovenly filmmaking in which the camera is treated mainly as a device to record actors saying dialogue, this is welcome. But there are times when the images are lingered on too lovingly, and you may start to feel as if the component parts of the movie are preventing it from holistic excellence.<\/p>\n There are pacing and rhythm problems too, I think. It\u2019s not that the movie is slow-paced, with a lot of lead-up to important moments and some sequences of abstractly framed shots that are more artful than useful; it\u2019s that the slowness lives awkwardly in that zone between \u201ctoo slow\u201d and \u201cnot slow enough,\u201d and it makes the totality feel disjointed. Lots of horror films are objectively slower than \u201cMother of Flies\u201d but still mesmerize from start to finish. This one is fascinating and often horrifically gorgeous, but not hypnotic. It\u2019s like a book of horrifying artwork that you can close at any time and return to later, rather than a nightmare that won\u2019t let you wake up.<\/p>\n But there are so many compensations that it\u2019s very much worth seeing for anyone who loves horror\u2014especially the atmospheric and gory, dread-based type, rather than the kind that is single-mindedly obsessed with staging jump-scares. The central performances are all special. They\u2019re not studied. They feel natural, even though every other aspect of the film is unreal and uncanny. And the woods are lovely, dark and deep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cMother of Flies,\u201d about a father and daughter who get tangled up with a faith healer in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-387969","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}