This year has given audiences no shortage of messy, campy horror films with eccentric villains at their heart — from Nicolas Cage's creepy titular role in Longlegs to Simon Prast's televangelist Ernest Miller in MaXXXine, and even Dan Stevens's enigmatic Herr König in Cuckoo. However, these outlandish and evil characters couldn't save their films from uneven and forgettable scripts, and Kathryn Hunter's remarkable turn as Solange in The Front Room is no different.
Directed and written by Max and Sam Eggers (brothers of director Robert Eggers), The Front Room is based on the short story of the same name by Susan Hill. The film follows Belinda (Brandy), a pregnant professor, who, along with her husband Norman (Andrew Burnap), take in his stepmother, Hunter's Solange, an ultra-religious, racist and unstable woman who quickly tries to control Belinda's marriage, pregnancy and child.
The Front Room's script is flat and stale. The uneven tone flip-flops between comedy and self-serious drama without saying anything engaging about Solange's religiosity or racism. The film plays with the evil stepmother trope and hagsploitation genre but never quite masters either. The gross-out humour employed by the Eggers brothers grows tired very quickly, including a shocking amount of urine and poop in this film due to Solange's incontinence — a completely cringeworthy addition.
Because of this chaos, the film barely scratches the surface of the elements introduced throughout. Solange's belief that the Holy Spirit possesses her, along with her treatment of Belinda because of her race, and even the out-of-place Freudian elements, are intriguing inclusions that could have been strengthened had the Eggers spent less time with the poop and pee scenes.
Fortunately, though, The Front Room thrives whenever Solange is on screen, due to Hunter's unforgettable theatrical performance. Her exaggerated Southern accent and physicality offers laughs and saves the film from being entirely bland. During a dinner table scene in which Belinda calls out Solange's ridiculous, controlling and racist behaviour, Solange begins behaving like a child by throwing food, making baby noises and farting, and it's clear that Hunter is all in.
Hunter – who audiences might recognize as the Three Witches in The Tragedy of Macbeth and Swiney in Poor Things – steals every scene and (nearly) makes the campiness of the film work because of her commitment to the film's strange nature, unlike her co-stars. Her performance, which will no doubt be compared to the previously mentioned villains, is one of the zaniest performances of the year.
The Front Room also features a sprawling, eerie score from Marcelo Zarvos that utilizes organs and classic religious songs. Zarvos's composition emphasizes the claustrophobic, unsettling atmosphere of Belinda and Norman's house due to Solange's presence. It feels referential to silent horror films, and wonderfully aids the wide lenses used in the film to highlight space and how Solange is taking over the house and Belinda's life.
Regardless, notwithstanding an extremely satisfying ending, inventive score and a daring performance from Hunter, The Front Room remains boring and lazy — a "M-E-Double-S Mess" of a film.