Review: The Voices of Our Mother

Director: Mark O’Brien

Stars: Georgina Reilly, Sheila McCarthy, Carolina Bartczak

As Father’s Day drops on summer solstice (those greedy men taking the longest day for themselves), why not change-up and spend 90ish minutes in the wintry, blackly comic hands of Canadian actor/filmmaker Mark O’Brien, whose matriarchal horror The Voices of Our Mother just dropped on Shudder. Presenting as a typically washed out, pale and grimly serious genre exercise with portentous religious overtones and an oppressive palette of mourning, O’Brien’s latest certainly has the appearance of quite generic fare, but his flavour for acidic family squabbles feathered with cutting put-downs enlivens what could quite easily have been a drudging affair.

Aging matriarch Harriet (Sheila McCarthy) has seemingly suffered a stroke in the presence of her own mother (Anna Ferguson); a cause for her disparate brood of estranged adult children to reconvene to determine what is to be done about her. Kudos to O’Brien for casting himself as the most openly hateful of the bunch, William, a failed author and itinerant gambler whose twin Therese (Carolina Bartczak) resents him for ‘stealing’ her wife. Cocaine-addled Martin (Alex Ozerov-Meyer) is happy to defer responsibility so long as the situation can be resolved quickly, while nun Annika (Georgina Reilly) is the seldom-seen black sheep, with a thorny past of her own.

To begin with the siblings squabble over the time and cost involved in providing care for the mother they’ve all disowned for the better part of their adult lives, and the callousness of their exchanges paints the most of them in a particularly poor light. Combined with the dour production design, the bristling between them makes O’Brien’s presentation verge on the grim; a sledgehammer representation of western disinterest and disrespect for our elders. Fortunately his penchant for wicked humour spikes the mixture, carrying us through with a rueful grin. Harriet’s doctor (Lanette Ware) – extraordinarily patient with this selfish gaggle – struggles to comprehend the contradictions of her patient’s symptoms, until Harriet herself ‘recovers’ and starts exhibiting a lively, sadistic new personality.

The middle of the film unpacks further resentments between Harriet’s children while, on the fringes, their mother seems to regain supernatural power, as though strengthened by the hate between the siblings. The more bile they spill, the bolder whatever holds her becomes. O’Brien’s jet-black interplay suggests a cyclical flow of damage, playing out the idea that we don’t merely inherit wounds and bitterness from our parents. It’s not a one-way street. His screenplay presents its own contradictions. The brothers particularly talk in riddles about a cagy, undisclosed past. Elsewhere, however, Annika expels reams of exposition for the sake of understanding and moving the story forward. The Voices of Our Mother sometimes feels like either feast or famine.

This is true for much of the picture. In the main it’s an actors’ piece with interplay that’d work as well on a stage as within a film. However, when violence ultimately spills out during a confrontation in the family basement, O’Brien belatedly kicks into a more fantastical gear. While some elements belay the film’s bugetary limitations (all those digital embers), there’s also a marked uptick in ambition as The Voices of Our Mother allows its genre elements to overtake and burn down the talky drama that has kept it confined to the peripheries. Reilly’s committed performance along with O’Brien’s dedication to a certain tone of sincerity echoed in Andrew Staniland’s music carry us through to a surprisingly heartfelt conclusion, representative of a darkly specific feminine lineage.

Family can really be hell.