Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for The Front Room.You gotta love the in-laws. Or then again, maybe you don’t. That’s a lessonBrandy Norwood’s Belinda squares with as a besieged expectant mother inMax EggersandSam Eggers' (brothers ofThe Witchdirector,Robert Eggers) new A24 horror entryThe Front Room. The film sees Belinda’s material bliss disrupted when her elderly mother-in-law Solange(Kathryn Hunter) comes to stay with her as she prepares to give birth. As Belinda contends with the extremely religious elderly woman, it’s a battle of wills over Belinda’s new child and the soul of her home in a uniquely comedic thriller. But what’s it all about?
What Is ‘The Front Room’ About?
Belinda and her husband Norman (Andrew Burnap) are expecting their second child.They tragically lost their first, which adds more than a little hesitation and emotional weight to the exciting news (especially in light of their financial difficulties). When Norman’s father passes, his final request is that Normanallow his estranged mother Solange to live in his home. She’s an incontinent, manipulative, oppressively religious, racist woman with a history of traumatizing Norman and believing she’s regularly possessed by the Holy Spirit, a set of facts that put her remarkably at odds with Belinda… but she also comes with a sizable inheritance. She moves in,setting off an ever-escalating domestic warbetween Belinda and the elderly tyrant, putting the fate of their family, home, and child at stake.
Belinda and Solange Square Off Over Who Gets To Be Matriarch
The Front Roomcertainly provides sufficient context to understand the central conflict between Belinda and Solange. The central reason why Norman didn’t initially want to allow Solange to live with the couple isbecause of his estrangement due to her strict, arguably abusive, parenting styleas stepmother. Solange would be extremely stern and strict, all in an effort to coercively impose her cultish version of Christianity on the young Norman. It’s an orientation that comes to dominate her approach within the family’s home. There are different facets of their growing disagreement, withreligious, emotional, and practical elements to boot, but the main tensioncenters around who gets to bethe family’s matriarch.
‘The Front Room’ Review: Brandy and Kathryn Hunter Are Forces of (Un)Nature in Absurd A24 Horror
This movie is more proof you should never let you in-laws move in.
Solange begins with a feigned, sometimes passive-aggressive respect for Belinda’s place as the family’s maternal figure.After settling in, the subtle criticisms mount: Solange criticizes Belinda’s cooking, the presence of Goddess figures (stemming from Belinda’s interests as an Anthropologist) and absence of Christian iconography, the baby’s lack of feeding, even the baby’s name, each in a domineering spirit. “She wants to replace me,” Belinda acknowledges at one point in the film. After the child’s born, the tension escalates to Belinda yelling “I am her mother!” to which Solange retorts “Oh no ya ain’t!“It’s a battle for maternal domination.
Solange’s Supposed Powers Are Likely Fake
Another layer of the film is introduced early on. While Belinda is a secular-minded academic with an interest in Goddess mythologies, Solange is a dedicated believer in what appears at face value to be an Evangelical sect of Christianity. Most important for our understanding of this element of their conflict is thatSolange seemingly believes she’s regularly possessed by the Holy Spirit, which she calls her “signs and wonders.” Fellow members of her church seem to believe in the sincerity of these beliefs, and as the conflict with Belinda escalates, so do her seeming powers.
Afterthe baby’s birth, Belinda is left with a gnarly, crooked, vertical C-section scar. The next morning, it seems slightly improved.The rest of the supposed manifestations of powers also follow the child’s birth, such as late-night appearances of Solange as a Virgin Mary figure, holding the new baby (or, alternately, an infantilized version of Norman in another vision). Are these actual manifestations real? At times, the sleep-deprived (thanks to a perpetually crying baby combined with Solange’s intentional elderly terrors)Belinda comes to believe in them. At the same time, Belinda does witness seeming daytime evidence that Solange may not need her walker as much as she appears to, and hasclear evidence of Solange’s manipulations when she throws herself on a tableto elicit sympathy from Norman. Between the only evidence of Solange’s “signs and wonders” being accompanied by Belinda’s absolute exhaustion and the ample evidence of the former’s penchant for deception,there’s no real reason to believe in Solange’s claims.
How Does ‘The Front Room’ End?
The escalation of events, combined with Solange’s constant use of her own incontinence to torment Belinda, brings the latter to the brink of insanity. When their baby, Laurie, appears to have a large human bite mark (that’s missing a few teeth), it’s clear to Belinda that Solange bit the child. Solange spends a fateful night caterwauling over how she wants to die, and in the morning she’s found dead and cold. Here, the film implies Solange died in her sleep, butwe then get the reveal that Belinda secretly smothers Solange with a pillow in the middle of the night.
Belinda’s decision to murder Solange underscores the extreme lengths she’s been pushed to —the rest of the film paints Belinda as a compassionate, kind soul, so surely it’s no casual act.The finale implicitly portrays the choice as the right one for the new mother, however, with a lighthearted tone and the dramatic reversal of the entirety of Belinda’s troubles: a new job, the implied end to their financial problems, a new house, and even a new child, and Belinda is evidently happy without any regrets. It’s a dark end to the horror-comedy, but the Eggers brothers want us to know with certainty that Belinda’s best life came after ending Solange’s.
The Front Room
The Front Roomis in theaters now in the U.S.
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