The Front Room (2024)

Score: 2 / 5

Expectations can ruin films. Due to marketing or other, we've all experienced major letdowns when a new work of art doesn't quite match what we hope it will be. Personally, I attempt to leave expectations at the door to better access the film on its own terms, but we are all victims of that pitfall nonetheless. Yet when a film itself -- by nature of its premise -- establishes its own promises of what's to come and then fails to deliver that, disappointment and frustration will (and, I think, should) dampen your experience. For a recent example, I fully expected Babygirl to be a smutty but delicious erotic thriller with a nasty denouement; it turned out to be a shockingly restrained, nuanced, and thoughtful navigation through sexual mores in an increasingly fraught landscape of desire and agency.

The Front Room, produced by A24 and written and directed by Robert Eggers's two half-brothers Max and Sam, promised a lot to us, not least of which was the return of Brandy to the silver screen. She plays Belinda, a non-tenured professor who is treated like an adjunct at her troubled local college, who is pregnant with her public defender husband Norman (Andrew Burnap). With maternity leave looming and being barred from promotion at work, she quits, pushing their family into dire financial straits. The story, essentially, takes off from here: when Norman's estranged father dies, his stepmother calls to invite them to the funeral, and though he does not really want to attend, they do together. There, they encounter Solange, the aging and infirm widow, who pressures them into accepting her offer: take her into their home for the rest of her life, and she'll pay their mortgage and will them everything in her estate. Desperate but worried, they accept, and Solange moves into the titular space of honor in their house.

With a tagline like "All hell moves in," we are meant to expect that this arrangement will be torturous for Belinda and Norman, and indeed it is. Belinda, very pregnant and home alone, must care for Solange, who is rude and crude, deliberately mispronouncing her name and aggressively demanding to be catered to, hand and foot. To Belinda's nascent horror, Solange is also incontinent and mostly incapable of moving freely about the house, much less cleaning up after herself. Mothers-in-law may be stereotypically monstrous, but this is on another level, made much worse by Solange's fire-and-brimstone brand of Christianity (it seems to be an offshoot of Pentecostalism) and literally certified racist social philosophy. If Rosemary's Baby was about a pregnant woman trying to free herself from menacing forces closing in around her, The Front Room is about a pregnant woman needing to purge her own home of the evil within. Belinda and Solange are set up as two forces of nature meant to engage in a final battle of wits, belief, and power.

But that never actually happens. Sure, there are lots of encounters and fights and horrific messes (and I do mean lots), but the film never feels as claustrophobic or frightening as it should. Rather, it injects absurdity into most of its scenes, aided by bright, lurid color schemes that make everything feel more surreal than disturbing. The messes, disgusting as they are, are never really leaned into beyond a few nightmarish montages that flick by like a circus fever dream. Worse, Solange is never as menacing as she should be with her white supremacist and evangelical bona fides. This makes Belinda appear all the more incapable or weak, to say nothing of Norman, whose tender words of affirmation for her are proven, over time, to be practically all he has to offer in their marriage, their family, and their life. His ineptitude is almost as infuriating as Belinda's longsuffering, especially being a strong Black woman and soon-to-be mother.

Brandy does give a capable performance, but she can't do much with a character all but sapped of her own empowerment. The other actors are mostly forgettable and do little of import here. Kathryn Hunter, though, plays Solange with a cruel deftness that is intoxicating and certainly worth watching the film to experience. Unfortunately, her demoniac presence is similarly hindered by the screenplay, which seems scared to actually make the film be about anything. Tonally, the film is a mess, which doesn't help, and various scenes feel directed as thrilling, horrifying, silly, gross, and tepid, without any connective tissue or purpose from one sequence to the next. There is almost no tension, no fear, not even brazen attempts to fight back from any character. Is Solange's piety a cover for Satanic rituals? Will Solange bring other racists to Belinda's house and terrorize her? At one point, I even wondered if Solange would die and that Belinda's baby would be some perverse reincarnation. None of these pan out, and literally any of them would have been a worthy climax for this premise.

Instead, we get a familiar and quaint ending that might have worked in the '90s but simply doesn't now. With that to finish off this insipid and generally dull "thriller," I was left wondering what exactly the writers, producers, and distributors were thinking with this tired and shallow final product. A few more rounds of workshopping would have certainly helped, along with a strong dose of inspiration.