The Front Room wears out its welcome as quickly as its in-law from hell

Horror movies prey on audience fears, whether they be mundane everyday concerns or primordial dreads that lay buried deep in our gray matter. The Front Room, the feature-length debut for Robert Eggers’ brothers Max and Sam, certainly isn’t lacking in phobias to exploit. It rifles through a grab bag of concerns, from childrearing gone wrong to the overwhelming influence of evangelicalism in America. But among these rapidfire anxieties, there’s one horror that rises decisively above the rest: in-laws who wear out their welcome.

While The Front Room has fun with the ridiculous premise of a married couple being terrorized by an elderly Southern belle in what feels like an extended Thanksgiving dinner gone wrong, its assortment of unsettling allusions don’t come together, each fighting for elbow room in this brief 90-minute picture. Most importantly, it commits a horror movie’s greatest sin: It simply isn’t very scary.

This is all the more disappointing because things begin with promise. Belinda (Brandy), a struggling adjunct professor, and her uninspiring lawyer husband Norman (Andrew Burnap) find themselves in a tough spot. Despite their advanced degrees, they’re struggling financially, which is a big problem considering that they have a baby on the way. As the pair worries about their future, Norman gets an unexpected call that leaves him even more mortified. It’s from his estranged stepmother, Solange (Kathryn Hunter), an elderly woman whose peculiar brand of Christianity still frightens him all these years later.

But despite the couple wanting nothing to do with her, Solange promises something they desperately need: If they take her in, they’ll become the sole beneficiaries in her will. They agree, but it doesn’t take long before things start to get weird. Lights flicker, strange tongues echo through the halls, and Belinda begins to get the sneaking suspicion that Solange is trying to replace her.

In these early moments, The Front Room shows flashes of something interesting, as tension builds and Solange’s plans remain vague. Many of these sequences hinge on Kathryn Hunter’s larger-than-life, scenery-chewing performance as this nefarious old lady, and she manages the difficult task of making a character who sounds like an alarmingly devout Foghorn Leghorn into a force to be feared. She balances sinister and comical touches nicely, as if she’s melding her performances as The Tragedy Of Macbeth’s creepy witches with the domestic prodding of Eedy Karn from Andor, a mom so annoying it helped radicalize her son into becoming a fascist bootlicker.

Meanwhile, cinematographer Ava Berkofsky’s camera skulks through suburban corridors, delighting in the suggestion that a deranged centenarian may be up to God knows what. Many of the most striking images come as Solange’s grasp on this place grows, trapping Belinda in cryptic visions that represent how she’s losing control over her own home. Brandy imbues Belinda with pathos and the resolve of someone unwilling to give up her place, but Max and Sam Eggers’ script doesn’t give the character much depth.

And while the camerawork and some of the performances make it seem that The Front Room will eventually build towards bone-chilling turns, this never comes to pass. Instead, it stays in an odd tonal limbo between comedy and horror, not frightening enough to disturb and not funny enough to elicit more than a few chuckles—it’s probably not a good sign that the only rise it got out of me was a little jump scare where a light unexpectedly turned on. By the end, it’s a few steps removed from feeling like a rejected SNL skit about old people with incontinence, gross in juvenile and largely uninteresting ways.

Although it may be tempting to compare The Front Room to another A24 horror movie, Hereditary, based on a few plot similarities (ancient religions with mysterious power, matriarchs that command a legion of followers), this film is unable to deliver a final gauntlet where sudden explosions of violence and alarming imagery leave so much bouncing around in your brain that sleep becomes elusive for the next few days. While The Front Room has a couple of blessings in a big performance from Kathryn Hunter and a handful of well-presented shots, none of it coalesces in any meaningful way, and it ends so quickly that it feels like a crucial 15 minutes of footage got lost somewhere. These many unresolved threads make the movie come across as the worst possible incarnation of that awful buzzword, “elevated horror,” not only forgetting the scares but also mangling its larger ideas beyond recognition.

Director: Max Eggers, Sam Eggers
Writers: Max Eggers, Sam Eggers
Cast: Brandy, Kathryn Hunter, Andrew Burnap, Neal Huff
Release Date: September 6, 2024