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.
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.
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.
