Matriarch

dir: Ben Steiner

2022

Matriarch is sort of predicated on the idea that, damn, mothers can be quite harsh.

I mean, that’s relatable, surely? Some people, even ones that have or had a decent, loving relationship with their mums as adults can still have an array of unresolved or unresolvable conflicts.

Well, a further qualification of this premise is: What if, as an adult, you were a drug addicted fuck up, and the mother you hated was the leader of some weird village sex cult?

This murky, muddled, made for tv-looking horror flick probably has a decent cast, it’s hard to tell. Most of the flick is spent watching the main character ping around like a ball in a pinball machine.

Laura (Jemima Rooper) works for an ad company, and like all people who work in the ad industry, she is doing cocaine constantly and sculling vodka from a water bottle. Though this behaviour isn’t celebrated by the people around her, once we figure out that she hates her mother, we think “oh, she’s like this because of her mum.”

At a moment when it looks like Laura has checked out completely, she wakes up again, but only after seeming like some black ichor / liquid has seeped into her body.

Gross. This prompts her to go back to whatever village she was from to talk with the mother she has avoided for 20 years, played by Kate Dickie.

It’s never explained why the mum, clearly a Scot, and the daughter don’t have the same accent, but I guess it’s immaterial. The mum is, right from the start, making all these clucky noises of concern, but constantly trying to roofie Laura. The movie makes no attempt to hide the fact that Celia, the mum, is constantly trying to knock Laura out and to drag her to a greenhouse.

Laura’s journey is meant to be like “oh, wow, I have a heap of unresolved issues, and maybe if I return home and talk to my mum, and to some other locals, including my ex-girlfriend from 20 years ago, I can resolve some stuff and move on with my life?”

The mum’s journey is “nah, I cannae stand ye and ye haff te fucken die.”

Not a lot of closure is going to be achieved here, for any of the generations. For a while, you remain curious as to why things are so weird in this village, and why people keep tabs on Laura while on the phone with Celia. I mean, if there’s one thing that every English film over the last 100 years has taught us is that every village in England has some kind of pagan force ruling everything and pretty much everyone is a murderer. Except in the Midsomer of Midsomer Murders where surely everyone has been midsomer murdered by now.

This town, turns out, is ruled by a matriarch who is linked to something I cannot even describe. Some kind of many-boobed, maggot-mouthed entity. In exchange for human sacrifices(?), it gives Celia the power to, I dunno, leak black ichor out of her nipples.

There’s a reoccurring image of a couple in a car going at it, at first. There still there days later, but, because of this black liquid stuff, either it makes them super horny, or it kills them, or it makes them eat each other (and I don’t mean that in the giving head sense).

I have no idea what the black stuff actually does. Maybe it makes Celia more youthful, or immortal, and maybe it heals people (one character refers to it as having cured their cancer, but I was pretty bored so I may have misheard).

I don’t know how this black stuff travelled through the postal system or the 5G cellular / vaccine network to London and then either killed Laura or brought her back from the dead just so that her mother could lure her back in order to kill her and make more black stuff? Murky plotting, murky visuals, murky feelings (on my part).

Admittedly, in horror, clear explanations and logical reasons can be the enemy of atmosphere and the terror these flicks are meant to engender. I don’t need someone to come along and clearly enunciate everything that may not be clear, or do a PowerPoint presentation setting out everything so it all wraps up neatly.

What I do need is someone or something to care about, in order for the horrible things to be something to dread. Here, because I couldn’t make any sense out of why Laura was even there, or why she was sticking around (poorly motivated by saying something like “my near death experience made me want to come back and find out what happened to the dad I never met”).

When the flick is such that everyone seems pretty awful, and the threat is something all pervasive but indistinct, like a deadly fog or an invisible plague, it takes a lot of (cinematic) effort to make that compelling for me. Nothing about this flick called Matriarch or any of its characters were remotely compelling to me. None of the psychology behind any of the characters felt there, nothing was shot in a way encouraged any feeling or sensation in any direction. None of the cinematography, functional at best, drab and oppressive at worst (probably intentional), worked for me, making it look cheap and nasty, but not because of budget considerations.

It didn’t cost me much time or effort other than streaming this, because even though it’s been out for a week, it’s a Hulu Original, meaning that Disney+’s menu sucked me into watching it at no additional cost. But somehow I still feel like I’ve been ripped off.

I really didn’t get it, but maybe that’s because it might be a form of horror that doesn’t really work for me. If it is a sub-genre, it might be British folk horror, which played a part in the recent Alex Garland flick Men as a reference point, which I didn’t like that much either, but I think that was for completely different reasons. There is stuff in that genre that I’ve seen recently that I did respect more (In The Earth, Gaia, The Hallow) even if I didn’t like it that much, but the most famous example will always be the original Wicker Man.

Maybe there’s a disconnect there with me in not really “getting” this genre, but either way I would argue even if that were the case, this fucking flick is not a good example of it. I naturally find the actor playing the mum unsettling and disturbing to spend time with, but that’s not because she’s Scottish – it’s because she played the loopy and disturbing Lysa Arryn on Game of Thrones, a role she was very good at. She tries to bring that same energy to this role in Matriarch - desperate and beseeching but hiding the fact that she loves to murder motherfuckers dead – but it in no way works here. Most of the time she seems like she's in a different flick than the one Laura is in, and I just wanted both of those movies to end.

I didn’t want or care if any of the characters survived, and the movie gave me my wish, but I am none the happier about it.

4 times this would not a good Halloween watch at Halloween or at any other time of the year out of 10

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“I want to try to get past the past.” – yeah but none of us can tho - Matriarch