Prepare Yourself For This Year’s Grossest Horror Comedy

Relatives are generally seen as just another fact of life, people who can either be a comfort, an annoyance, or a burden. Given the multi-faceted nature of people, it’s typically some mixture of all three. Yet their burdens can quickly become quirks that get raised to the level of family mythology, a series of events, stories and inside jokes that only you and those related to you can chuckle at. Stuff like “Oops, Aunt Lydia stunk up the bathroom again” turns the chore-esque aspect of having relatives into something more manageable, even charming. Because, deep down, there’s love there, and being human is not always an easy or smooth experience. But what if there wasn’t any love? What if there was only hate, and not just run of the mill hate, but deep-seated, generational, bigoted hate?

That’s just one of the themes explored by “The Front Room,” the first feature from directors Max and Sam Eggers. While there have been numerous comedies made about the burden of having in-laws, “The Front Room” takes a skewed look at the subject through a horror movie lens, one which allows it to delve into so many tones and psychological aspects beyond the simple tug-of-war between a young pregnant wife and her husband’s infirm mother. The Eggers brothers (twins, even!) concoct a story (based loosely on Susan Hill’s 2016 short story) that’s part Hagsploitation, part sitcom, part “Rosemary’s Baby”-esque pregnancy horror, part religious/occult horror, and part gross-out camp satire. If that sounds like a lot of movie, then rest assured that the Eggers brothers have a good handle on making it all come together, helped in large part by their delightfully able cast. Stars Brandy Norwood and Kathryn Hunter make “The Front Room” an absolute delight, allowing what could’ve been too off-putting an experience to become a fantastic ride through in-law Hell.

Like nearly all great horror, “The Front Room” has a complexity that stands in contrast to its relatively simple setup and structure. Belinda (Brandy Norwood), an anthropology professor at a university, has recently become pregnant after she and her doting husband, Norman (Andrew Burnap) suffered a stillbirth not too long ago. After the university refuses to offer her tenure and Norman’s career as a public defender becomes stagnant, Belinda begins to worry whether she and her husband can even keep their home, let alone be able to take care of their impending child. Suddenly, the ominous light of fate shines upon them: Norman’s father, from whom he’d been estranged, passes away, and his step-mother Solange (Kathryn Hunter) wishes to reconnect. Upon doing so, Solange offers Norman and Belinda her entire inheritance, which is robust enough to make their financial woes disappear. The catch? She insists that she move in with them indefinitely.

Belinda and Norman have no choice but to agree to the arrangement, and see it only as a matter of course when Solange insists on taking over the front room that was originally intended for their daughter’s nursery. Soon enough, however, Belinda finds Solange insinuating herself into every aspect of her and her husband’s lives, including changing their house’s decor and insisting on naming their unborn child. Adding a worrying insult to the injury of Belinda becoming Solange’s sole de facto caregiver (thanks to Norman’s job beginning to take off) is her discovery that Solange is a literal card-carrying racist. Additionally, Solange’s religious beliefs include her insistence that she has some supernatural ability, something she calls her “signs and wonders.” When Solange’s friends — who appear to be something more like a cult or coven — begin turning up unannounced and taking a vested interest in getting a hold of the couple’s newborn baby, Belinda begins to believe that Solange isn’t just a nuisance, but a wicked stepmother with nefarious plans for her and her family.

While there’s plenty of intensity and menace in the film, Max and Sam Eggers keep the movie’s horror more psychological than visceral; this is not a gory, bloody movie. What makes up for that is the film’s copious amounts of bodily fluids, with Solange’s age and attendant infirmities (including but not limited to incontinence) providing the film with icky body horror, the most literal kind. Although “The Front Room” is reminiscent of films that range from “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” to “Hereditary,” the one it most resembles in its horror elements is M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Visit,” a similar look at how the supposed docility of the elderly can mask insidious menace.

If “The Front Room” were 94 minutes of crude, gross-out humor, however, I wouldn’t be recommending it as highly. It must be stated that for me, someone pretty much inured to gore and grue, watching the film was at times an unpleasant experience. Yet in addition to the deliciously go-for-broke performances of the cast, the richness of the film that the Eggers bring to the material kept me consistently engaged. Right from the jump, Max and Sam infuse the movie with various religious, spiritual, and occult imagery, an indication that something much greater than a mere tiff between women is happening in the film. The movie doesn’t want to just work on a base level, but also wants to try and encompass the various psychological, sociological and mythological dynamics at play, too.

This interest seems typical of the Eggers family; after all, Max and Sam are the brothers of Robert Eggers, he of “The VVitch,” “The Lighthouse,” and this December’s “Nosferatu” fame, whose films are similarly steeped in humanity’s collective cultural past. Through Belinda’s expertise in the history of the mother and goddess figure within myth and culture, as through Solange’s skewed and fundamentalist religious beliefs, “The Front Room” becomes so much more than a feud between in-laws; it’s a duel between the sacred and the profane, with both sides making an argument for their supremacy. The movie’s art team, in conjunction with cinematographer Ava Berkofsky, lend the film an aesthetic that seems as inspired by Andrew Wyeth paintings and works of literature (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 “The Yellow Wallpaper” is name checked in the production notes) as it is by other movies. With all of this as background, “The Front Room” plays like an especially demented fairy tale, of the Grimm variety (another pair of brothers, naturally).

While there’s a lot to dig into in the film, “The Front Room” offers one highly accessible pleasure which doesn’t require much to be appealing, and that’s the way Norwood and Hunter play off of each other. Each actress has her character ably supported by her fellow filmmakers — just wait until you hear the sound design by Ric Schnupp for Solange’s introduction — yet they largely hold their own, so much so that one could see the material working just as well in a Broadway version as it does a film. Hunter is expectedly fabulous, especially given her prior performance as one of the Witches (and an Old Man) in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” bringing a twinkle in her eye to Solange’s wicked old Southern belle. Brandy, whose last horror appearance saw her fleeing from the Fisherman in “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,” is a revelation, twisting her “Cinderella” screen persona into a different kind of fairy tale heroine, one who perhaps isn’t as innocent as is to be expected. She’s only very mindful and very demure until she can no longer stand it, and whether the grief is coming from her mother-in-law or society at large doesn’t matter.

Horror is traditionally a genre that sees many great breakouts and debuts, and the Eggers twins join their brother in making a splashy first feature that impresses. What is perhaps most commendable about “The Front Room” is the way it operates on all those levels and layers; this is very likely going to be a crowd pleasing movie, one to hoot and holler about. Beneath all that hooting and hollering, though, lies a psychologically rich tale that I believe will reward multiple viewings. Just fair warning: don’t watch it too close to a meal, especially if that meal will have your relatives in attendance.

/Film Rating: 8 out of 10

“The Front Room” opens September 6, 2024 in theaters.