The Voices of Our Mother
It was Tolstoy who suggested that all happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but for twins William and Therese and their younger siblings Annika and Martin their upbringing was truly spectacular in its dysfunction, their late father violently abusive, their mother Harriet indifferent to their suffering, a weak woman who never once intervened to protect them.
Clinging to her own mother Johanna, an anchor and a shelter from the horrors of the world, following Nana’s recent death Harriet herself has fallen ill, hospitalised following a presumed stroke but showing strange contradictory indicators, unresponsive but apparently physically in better health than befits her age, the siblings reunited for the first time in years for Nana’s funeral and to decide who is now to take care of the woman they all despise.
His previous films The Righteous and Shadow of God both deeply religious horrors of tainted and broken faith, the obligation and resentments of family and the shadows of the past, one a stranger arriving to take the place left empty by a lost child, the other the return of a dead father figure, writer and director Mark O’Brien now returns to familiarly bleak territory to consider the failings of maternal love as spoken through The Voices of Our Mother.
With The Umbrella Academy’s Sheila McCarthy as the apparently feeble but formidable Harriet and Red Lights’ Anna Ferguson as Johanna, seen in flashback, worn down by silent strength she has maintained through the years, O’Brien, Carolina Bartczak, Georgina Reilly and Alex Ozerov-Meyer are bitter academic William, raging widow Therese, distant but sanguine nun Annika and flaky Martin, the circumstances of their childhood making them feuding survivors but not allies, not even friends.
Harriet drawing crayon pictures of demonic forces since she was a child, Martin reaches for the obscure explanation that her aggression and uncontrollable behaviour are symptoms of possession, while William is more rational, their mothers’ mental state always precarious and now succumbing to dementia, but there is no amount of therapy which can help this family, up to their necks in secrets and drowning, too damaged and too far gone.
Turning on each other as manic laughter rises from the cellar where they have the monster which wears the bruised face of their mother locked, the confrontations and performances of the obscenely twisted family dynamic are more interesting than the supernatural aspects, O’Brien less successful in smoothly harnessing the powers at work into a coherent whole in The Voices of Our Mother than his previous horrors, the finale in particular suffering from insufficient resources to adequately represent the fiery vision of the hell that is family.
The Voices of Our Mother will be streaming on Shudder from Friday 19th June
