Reviews
‘Affection’ Is A Macabre Meditation On Memory That Gets Under Your Skin [BHFF Review]
Affection is an existential, claustrophobic examination of the self that’s more than its teases, twists, and turns
“I know the difference between what’s real and what’s a dream.”
Affection is such a rare, ambitious feat on multiple fronts — storytelling, editing, direction — but it’s a film that would absolutely fall apart without the right lead as an anchor. Jessica Rothe has been one to watch ever since Happy Death Day, but she is a goddamn revelation here. She puts everything she has into Ellie and the audience watches her live and die a hundred lives throughout this delicate tightrope walk of a film. It’s Rothe’s best work to date, which is saying something for a performer who is so consistently engaging and watchable.
Even outside of her delivery and performance, Rothe throws herself into a violent physical performance that showcases terrifying body language that’s on par with Isabelle Adjani from Possession or Nell Tiger Free from the more recent, The First Omen. Ellie — every version of her — is such a densely packed character who doesn’t hold back. The way in which her body rebels against itself also speaks to Ellie’s plight in which she doesn’t know what to trust. Reality, or rather her interpretation of reality, continually crumbles and needs to be rebuilt. It’s a fascinating place for Affection to begin that immediately puts the audience on guard as much as Ellie. They’re just as vulnerable and overwhelmed in this psychologically claustrophobic experience.
Ellie has a lot to unpack in Affection and finds herself in a frightening feedback loop in which she suffers from debilitating seizures that effectively reset her memory. Ellie struggles to accept the alleged life that belongs to her, including a husband and daughter who feel like utter strangers, all while invasive memories of a false existence pollute her mind. These parallel thoughts feel even realer than the truth that surrounds her, which prompts Ellie to unravel and have no idea who she can trust, including herself. Affection constantly creates a false sense of security that manipulates when the viewer lets down their guard and when they’re suspicious of Ellie’s situation. BT Meza’s script provides just enough details to create ambiguity over what’s real, yet it’s impossible to watch Ellie’s situation “improve“ without feeling a creeping sense of dread.
What’s so impressive about Rothe’s performance is that it’s not dissimilar to what she had to do in the Happy Death Day films. In Affection, it’s not as if reality itself resets every day, but the shift that Ellie experiences is just as dramatic. Yet through all this, Ellie’s haunted reactions to rediscovering her life again and again and again are completely different than her looping state of mind in Happy Death Day. This is a much more brutal and sullen story.
Affection is high concept horror, but it’s also a very stripped down film that limits itself to a cast of three. Joseph Cross and Julianna Layne shoulder this heavy lifting as Ellie’s husband and daughter. Neither is asked to do as much as Rothe, but they get the job done. There’s particular pressure on Layne, who rises to the occasion as a powerful foil for Rothe. The wrong child actor would have sunk Affection.
This family collectively reckons with big ideas like the loss and erasure of one’s identity. Affection explores deeper questions about what makes us ourselves and if it’s our memories and experiences, or the biology behind it all. It’s a melancholy story about grief, loss, and why these are necessary aspects of life that need to be accepted, not rebelled against. Affection illuminates the toxic, destructive lengths we’ll go to for “love“ and when that justification no longer holds weight and ceases to resemble itself, not unlike the aggressive transformations that Ellie experiences.
Affection is such an impressive debut feature from filmmaker BT Meza. This is a story that’s simultaneously simple and complex, the likes of which would fall apart under a less confident director. Affection pulls you in from its opening frames and doesn’t let go until the credits roll. A disorienting miasma of misinformation leaves the audience unsure of what to believe. This is entertaining, but it’s not enough to save the movie if there’s no substance beneath all the pageantry. Mystery box stories like this are such a big risk because they can fail to deliver beyond the initial setup. This puts tremendous pressure on the film’s ending, which will make or break the whole thing. Affection relies on a massive exposition dump that’s sure to polarize the audience. It pulls this off, but also does beg the question if all this might have worked better as a short film.
Meza’s film is most interested in the philosophical questions and psychological mind games that it puts this family through. However, Affection also builds to some really excellent goopy practical effects that amplify its b-movie to impulses. Affection’s second-half, after its big reveal, is considerably shaggier. However, it also takes much bigger swings and feels like the gonzo grindhouse twin of the film’s first half. It’s like the film transforms from a Black Mirror episode into a Tales from the Crypt installment. It’s a chaotic trajectory that amplifies the film’s tension, rather than letting it deflate upon its big revelations. It’s a smart decision by Meza that keeps the film’s third act as interesting as everything before it, even if it turns into a very different movie.
Affection is a high concept psychological thriller that’s worth the many twists and turns and proves that Jessica Rothe is the queen of horror/sci-fi genre hybrids. Meza is careful to not bite off more than he can chew, even if some elements could be handled a little more gracefully, and this stands tall as an ambitious showpiece. Affection is steeped in existential questions and fears that plague modern society, while it embraces the ethos of the ’80s through bold body horror. Add to that Rothe’s revelatory performance and Affection is a hidden gem that will connect with your mind, body, and soul.
Affection screened at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival; release info TBD.
Reviews
‘The Voices of Our Mother’ Review: Family Trauma Fuels This Uneven Shudder Possession Horror Film
Possession horror that focuses on the family of the afflicted, rather than the afflicted themselves or the doctors and priests tasked with solving a supernatural mystery, is often the most interesting approach in the subgenre. There are so many layers to it, questions of faith and belief, and searching for scapegoats even as someone you love suffers. It’s very fertile ground, and the new Shudder original The Voices of Our Mother approaches it with an interesting hook: What if the family members of a person who might be possessed come to the problem not out of love, but out of obligation?
It’s an interesting angle, and when combined with a dreamy visual style and a handful of confident performances, Mark O’Brien‘s film starts with a lot of promise and maintains a consistent dramatic tension throughout. There’s ambition here, and craft, and a sense of care that saves the film from oblivion, but unfortunately, thanks to confused pacing and certain baffling moments of characterization, all The Voices of Our Mother can really do, in the end, is avoid becoming a complete mess.
The mother of the title is Harriet (Sheila McCarthy), whose four adult children fled the home she shared with her own mother as quickly as they could and never looked back. For years, Harriet’s efforts to stay in touch with her children were in vain, at least until their grandmother dies suddenly and a devastated Harriet is hospitalized after a medical episode of her own. It’s only then that twin siblings William (O’Brien) and Therese (Carolina Bartczak), junkie baby brother Martin (Alex Ozerov-Meyer), and devoted nun Annika (Georgina Reilly) are forced to return home to bury their grandmother and deal with Harriet, whose physical and psychological issues are growing stranger by the day.
Photo Credit: Shudder
There’s a reason so many horror stories follow adults who must return to the site of their childhood trauma. It’s just such a charged environment for drama and psychological tension, as the characters fight to reconcile the understanding that comes with maturity with the rage and confusion they still feel over what happened long ago. O’Brien, who also wrote the screenplay, digs into this emotionally fertile ground immediately, showing us siblings who’ve left quite a few things unsaid, trying to reconnect even as their mother is constantly upsetting the delicate balance of peace they’re trying to construct for her.
In just his second feature as director (after 2021’s The Righteous), O’Brien recognizes the potency of the environment he’s created, and in the early minutes of the film, he exploits it. While Harriet recuperates in bed, the four siblings explore their various resentments, memories, and flat-out grudges from all angles, and it mostly works. The performances are solid, O’Brien works hard to infuse a genuinely distinctive visual style awash with dramatic reds and the glow of firelight into the proceedings, and the supernatural mystery at the core of the film is intriguing, if a little sloppily laid out. It’s a horror story built on the age-old conundrum over what to do with aging relatives with whom you’ve lost any real sense of emotional connection, and that’s palpably unsettling.
But these unsettling qualities never translate to real horror, or even a cohesive narrative, once the supernatural mystery of it all really starts rolling forward. As Harriet’s illness progresses, and she starts doing things like whispering secrets in her kids’ ears to turn them against each other, the film stirs up fresh drama but fails to deliver on the emotional throughlines of that drama. Characters make baffling decisions, and not in the way that horror characters often act out of passion or confusion or plain old fear.
Photo Credit: Shudder
The tension over Harriet’s real fate fades in and out as the kids squabble, and she only seems to act out in overtly horrifying ways when the script needs to wrap up an argument without ever actually arriving at any conclusions. It’s a shame, because when McCarthy’s actually able to flex her horror muscles and turn Harriet into something to be feared, she brings remarkably nuanced terror to the film, and yet the film barely wants to showcase it. It would rather, it seems, be a psychological drama about the fallout of Harriet’s illness, which would be fine if that drama held together. Instead, we’re left with a string of interesting scenes that never quite come together into a story worth following, and by the time the more overt horror elements kicked in, I’d grown too frustrated to really be hooked.
But The Voices of Our Mother is not all bad. McCarthy’s performance is solid, as is O’Brien’s, who injects a welcome naturalism into scenes that might otherwise be stiff. Reilly (who, as a Pontypool fan, I was just really happy to see), Bartczak, and Ozerov-Meyer bring their best to the material, but the film is just too tonally confused to deliver anything truly satisfying out of their work.
Still, I can’t help but think that with a little narrative tightening and some basic brush-ups on things like blocking and scene geography – the film is sometimes ambiguous on purpose but more often ambiguous by accident, like setups arrived half-formed – this thing could’ve gone much further. The Voices of Our Mother doesn’t work, but it’s far from a disaster, and I sincerely hope Mark O’Brien tries his hand at more horror in the future.
The Voices of Our Mother hits Shudder June 19.
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