55037: The Front Room

This is an "m-e-double-s" mess of a movie. Here's the elevator pitch:

Brandy and some dude are expecting a baby, and they have financial troubles that threaten to sink them until the dude's evil, elderly, racist stepmother moves into their Front Room and proceeds to shit her pants so much that Brandy eventually kills her.

Nothing about that pitch is false, but it does leave out some things. Maybe the old woman has supernatural powers, maybe she's possessed, maybe she can can communicate with dead babies, maybe Brandy has been driven insane by the loss of a previous child. I left those things out of the pitch because, while the film raises all these questions, it never fucking addresses them. And not in a "ooh, it's open to interpretation, you have to figure it out for yourself" kind of way, but more like a "meh, we ran out of time and film stock so we just didn't shoot the rest of the movie but you get the gist, right?"

I cannot stress just how unpleasant and unfulfilling this movie is. And maybe that's the point. Front Room is one of the first films I know of to really address the existential terror of the sandwich generation, though I suspect it's inadvertent. If it's on purpose, then kudos, and also "do a better job next time." The film centers on Brandy's Belinda, a hugely pregnant and equally frustrated young academic who is overlooked and disrespected at her university position (shock) to the point that she quits her job. Her husband, Andrew Burnap's harried public defender, Norman, works with her to keep their union financially and emotionally solvent, but things look bleak.

Then, out of the blue, Norman receives word that his estranged father has died, and his last wish was that Norman would look after his elderly stepmother, Solange (played with horrific accuracy by Kathryn Hunter). Oh, and Solange wants to leave her obscenely large estate to them both after she dies, which, she assures them, will be any day now. And the noose tightens. Belinda and Norman upend their lives to bring Solange into their home. They move the baby's planned nursery upstairs, so that Solange doesn't have to climb the stairs. They change their dinner routine. They change their decor. Then they change diapers. I can't tell you how much of this movie is spent on Solange's bowel movements and urination (and her catchphrase, "m-e-double-s"). More time is spent on her shits than on the baby's shits. Or the baby, for that matter.

Stuck in the middle of both sets of diapers is Belinda. Belinda, with her academic degrees and her career goals, is reduced to cleaning up the smeared shit of an old woman she doesn't know, and is also racist. Like, old school racist. This part of the movie is hopeless, dreadful, and terrifying. Oh, also, Solange channels the voice of Belinda's dead baby to tell her she's a bad mother or whatever, Belinda sleepwalks a lot, and the new baby is hypnotized by Solange's cross. I don't know, there's a lot going on here, supernaturally speaking, but it's just mentioned and then abandoned like a feral wolf baby. Instead, what we get is a pretty straightforward power struggle between the two women as Solange attempts to become the matriarch of the family.

It would be an interesting conflict, but for the almost thoughtless way it is resolved. Solange tries to gaslight Norman and Belinda by "framing" Belinda for biting the new baby. But Solange's teeth are fucked up in such a particular way that it's obvious she bit the child. At that point, Norman is firmly on Team "Let This Old Bitch Die in the Street," and the film is essentially over. All that's left is for Brandy to smother her while Solange yells, over and over, "Why can't I die?"

Again, nothing of that description is false.

It all ends with Brandy and Norman living happily ever after in a nice, new house, purchased with Solange's estate, and both in great new points of their awesome careers. It's a weird kind of wish fulfillment: if the sandwich generation life doesn't work for you, just kill off the old folks and enjoy their retirement savings. The message seems to be, "this is unsustainable, and the only answer is murder." Maybe that's the intent, but the filmmakers spend way more time exploring the many ways an old woman can soil herself than they do what the implications mean for the nuclear family.

I think there are the seeds of an interesting film here, but they're not nurtured and protected, so we're left with a withered, dried up husk of a sub-average horror movie. Like I said, it's an "m-e-double-s."