Written and directed by Kate Dolan
Starring Hazel Doupe, Carolyn Bracken, Ingrid Craige
Not Rated
Runtime: 93 minutes
In theaters and on demand March 25

by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

What kind of horror film is You Are Not My Mother? I found myself wondering as I watched it this past weekend, coincidentally just a few days before the spring equinox. Folk horror seems like an easy home for it, and I won’t be surprised if it’s marketed as such. But writer/director Kate Dolan is pulling from a lot of different horror traditions in her first feature for “folk horror” to feel like an oversimplification. Though the horror in Mother is definitively folkloric, as a film it felt most closely related to John Carpenter’s classic Halloween (1978) and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014).

The analogues to The Babadook are perhaps most obvious: both feature a socially isolated mother and child whose relationship is tested by malevolent supernatural forces. You Are Not My Mother is a sort of mirror image of Kent’s film, though, in that teenage daughter Char (Hazel Doupe) is its main character instead of her mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken). And, instead of the mother and child falling afoul of the supernatural together, Mother holds another mirror up to the common form of the changeling folk tale: it is not the child but the mother who is swapped out for an otherworldly double in Dolan’s film.

Mother also pulls from the suburban horror tradition of Halloween to break away from the largely home-bound horror in Babadook. We see Char going to and from school, interacting with teachers, classmates, and bullies. The horror that Char (and the audience) lives through is contextualized by the surface-level mundanity that exists outside of her home. There were, I think, even overt references to Halloween in the costuming of Char’s gran Rita (Craige), whose wardrobe feels very Laurie Strode circa 1978.

There are also a few hints (again, in my reading) to 1983’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch (dir. Tommy Lee Wallace), most notably a jack-o-lantern mask that might easily have come from the Silver Shamrock factory sitting in the background of an early scene. Halloween III was, after all, about an ancient Irish wizard seeking to punish the people of North America for turning the Irish folk festival of Samhain into the harmless fun of Halloween. The folklore and old, dark magic of Samhain runs just below the surface of Mother, which Dolan is perhaps trying to reappropriate in the name of its Irish birthplace.

That’s part of why I find this film so fascinating: it taps into folk history in a way that Euro-American films really can’t. We don’t have the same history, the same depth of past in our surroundings to draw from. We have to either import our folklore from Europe, as is literally the case in Halloween III (which is a film I love, by the way), or try to appropriate the folk traditions of the land’s original inhabitants (which shouldn’t really be an option). I love what Dolan has been able to do with Mother, bringing Irish folk traditions into a modern setting without decontexualizing them, and spinning it all into a really good horror story.

Another thing I love about Mother is that it's a female-centered story that’s actually written and directed by a woman. I’m not suggesting that women are the only ones who can write or direct films about women. I am, however, extremely skeptical of films that are written, directed, and produced by men but are about women, especially when it’s a horror film or story rooted in trauma (or both). I just don’t trust men to do it right and, let’s be honest, we’ve had enough chances to try.

You Are Not My Mother is an excellent film that’s more psychological slow-burn than folk horror. It’s less intense than Halloween and The Babadook, but should serve you well if you’re looking for something that hits a lot of the same notes. It has a stellar cast, especially Doupe, who proves more than capable of shouldering the weight of the film. As for Dolan, after watching this and her 2017 short Catcalls (which is free to watch on her website) I am really excited for her future as a filmmaker. Whatever her next project ends up being, I will be waiting in line to see it.