Mother of Flies

dir: The Adams Family

2025

Mother of Flies is the most recent horror movie from a family of talented weirdos, possibly the most talented family of weirdos, that I’ve ever come across.

Rather than extol the virtues of their previous films, let me just launch in to why this flick works so well; lots of movies have witches as characters, as threats, as the big bad, and these flicks are often set in nature, but few flicks fuse together their natural settings and their themes in a manner that works perfectly from a storytelling perspective.

Is a witch a magical being made powerful by being outside of nature, above nature, more than nature, or does their power derive from being so in tune with nature that magical stuff happens?

In this flick someone who embraces nature fully has to embrace if not seduce Death as well in order to neither be living nor dead, but some third state in between, which is all well and good for witches and necromancers, but what about regular people? Regular shmoes, just trying to survive the everyday?

Micky (Zelda Adams) has been struggling with cancer and chemo / radiation therapy for years, but it hasn’t staved off the tumour that now seems like it’s going to kill her. There is nothing more that so-called Western medicine can do for her. So she turns to an unlikely possible cure.

I’m not talking about alternative medicine, or those dickheads who will tell you / sell you ivermectin / horse dewormer, or like Helen Garner’s friend in her novel The Spare Room who had cancer and had been convinced that massive doses of Vitamin C would save her (dear reader: it didn’t).

In Mother of Flies, a witch contacts Mickey through her dreams and tells her where to come so that they can help each other out.

Micky and her dad (John Adams) drive the trusty family Subaru to upstate New York and try to find this woman with the plan. Dad is skeptical. Micky is like “I’m stuffed anyway, what difference could it make?” When they get where they’re going, it’s a three story treehouse with a tree literally growing through the house. Micky gets a bed covered in green moss. Seems comfy.

Dad is shown to a bed covered in, uh, thorns and sticks maybe? Is he being punished for not believing?

And who is the one showing them around this open air mansion in the trees? Well, it’s Solveig (Toby Poser) a woman draped in black cloth who whispers and mumbles quite disturbing things at all times. She never seems particularly concerned with anything at any time, and never raises her voice, but she does seem to love dead things a whole hell of a lot, and she’s surrounded by clouds of flies.

I’m sure it’s not a big deal.

At the front of her, uh, alternative health spa, there is a pile of stones stacked up pretty high. I’m sure this structure doesn’t mean anything and won’t play any part in what’s to follow.

Solveig cryptically keeps referring to the work that needs doing in order to save Micky, but speaks so cryptically that it would seem she’s really trying to achieve something else. Something very much else.

The whole while we are being treated to a lot of nature shots, natural vistas and the like, but here it’s just adding to the disturbing atmosphere. None of those natural shots feel like they’re uplifting or about the beauty and equilibrium of the natural world. There are pounding away at the theme of nature being dependent on a lot of death in order to get by.

It would not be fair to just say Solveig is a witch. “Witch” is just a mean term used by men (and some women) to oppress other women, or get them killed. We know, like, you and I, and most reasonable people on the planet, that there never have been and never likely will be women with magical powers dependent on wing of bat and eye of newt. We get that it’s a common trope / concept in stories and stuff, but a lot of people acted like this shit was real and hung / tortured/ murdered a lot of women just for being women.

Anyway, Solveig isn’t a witch. She’s something far worse.

There is a lot of horrific imagery in this flick, the vast majority of which is created practically, physically. I truly appreciate the skill and artistry involved. Nothing, really, is scarier or looks scarier than a birth gone wrong. I mean, a birth gone right is still plenty horrifying for all involved, but this film truly does achieve some genuinely disturbing images that at a younger age would have filled me with deep dread, because I would be certain that the more disturbing the image, the less likely I would be to be able to stop thinking about it.

Like many people who watched horror movies at too young an age, those firsts ones engraved their way onto your eyeballs and sanity in a way that meant for weeks or months you would be discussing this terrible material with other kids with a kind of hushed awe. And some people never recovered, in the same way that others like me went on to be lifelong fans of fright flicks and monstrous movies.

These days? Not so much of a problem, thanks to alcohol.

There are horrible images here to behold and marvel at, but if you’re old enough and jaded enough, they won’t warp your psyche too much. The Adamses are adept at what they do, having a deft hand at crafting some truly ghastly scenarios. What happened to Solveig in the past, and what Solveig does in the present is pretty eye-opening, bloodcurdling stuff.

And yet one of the most disconcerting images for me is just the image of Solveig’s hand holding a small branch of thorns, which she uses to do all sorts of mischief. It can do so much evil, and yet seems so innocuous.

But this isn’t about just creating a video nasty. As this is a family affair, like all their films, Mama (Toby Poser) and Dadda (John Adams) have both survived cancer themselves, and Zelda recently found out she has Lynch syndrome, meaning a genetic predisposition towards getting particular bowel and endometrial cancers. That couldn’t have been fun.

This is a family that has been talking about cancer in their daily lives, so it makes sense that it would make its way into their art.

This is, as you would guess, mostly a three-hander, and the beauty of that is if two of the actors are onscreen, you can be reasonably sure that the one not in the scene is the one holding the camera.

When Micky’s dad gets sick of putting up with the rustic conditions at the witch’s house, he hotfoots it to a hotel, where, of course, the youngest member of the Adams clan, being Lulu, can deliver some much needed exposition about who Solveig is before the film’s last section can really kick off.

The story wraps up, almost perfectly, almost too neatly, but it’s a great end for this story, and I was quite relieved, because I always assume with films made by this family, and with most horror flicks, that everyone will die in the end, because horror flicks are most honest about these things.

We don’t all pay taxes, but Death comes for us all in the end. Whether we fight it or embrace it is up to us.

8 times the family that makes slayer films together stays together out of 10

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“Your curse is my blessing” - Mother of Flies