If you had a vision board for parenting goals, it would no doubt be dominated by images of the ultra-cool Adams-Poser family, a clan comprising upstate New York hep cat parents (Toby Poser and John Adams) and their hep kitten kids (Zelda and Lulu Adams) who make low-budget thriller-horror features together. The family members multitask above and beyond, serving not just as co-directors, co-writers, producers and stars, but also operating the camera and making the costumes. The results are genuinely striking, professional and effective (especially in terms of scare-generation). And if the scripts are often a smidge pretentious, they are never less than interesting and always original.
Their previous offerings include Hellbender, Halfway to Zen and Rumblestrips, tales that often revolve around families or familial units, although John Adams doesn’t always play the dad character and Poser isn’t always the mother. In their latest, Poser has cracked open the indigo pot and spun up some wool to make a witchy, cerulean outfit to play weird woman Solveig, a figure with strong maternal feelings, not least towards the many bluebottles that follow her everywhere; she isn’t, however, technically a mother to the protagonist, college student Mickey (Zelda Adams). The economical dialogue eventually reveals that Mickey survived cancer some years ago which resulted in a hysterectomy, but a new inoperable tumour the size of an apple (very biblical) has recently grown in her abdomen and she has maybe six months to live.
Willing to try anything that might help, Mickey answers a mysterious summons to visit Solveig in a remote, dank forest house, accompanied by her widowed father, Jake (John Adams). The accommodation looks like an ornate Victorian house mated with a baobab tree, producing a structure made of mostly gnarled roots and limbs covered with moss. Jake isn’t thrilled with the foraged mushroom and leaf diet, or the lack of en suite bathrooms, but he is game for anything that might help his daughter. Mickey is more open to Solveig’s bizarre hospitality, pointedly antiquated circumlocution and tendency to microdose her guests with psychedelics. No doubt some viewers would rate this experience highly if it were offered on Airbnb.
The film-makers build up a thick miasma of atmosphere over the first 45 minutes as the visuals switch between Mickey and Jake’s puzzled normie points of view and the more outlandish visions and memories connected to Solveig. The latter come drenched in fake blood, populated by rotting corpses with huge screaming mouths, and stillborn babies chucked unceremoniously into buckets while assorted supporting players – many of whom, if you check the credits, have the surname Adams, funnily enough – stand around looking solemn and menacing.
The effect is unnerving and fecund with menace, but there are a few too many sequences padding out the action where we hear Solveig intoning what sounds like bad Emily Dickinson parodies – stuff like “The truth won’t hide in dreams/It lies still/Seen”, the rhythms sprung like a battered mattresses. Overall, this is better and glossier than some of the Adams-Poser posse’s earlier efforts, but perhaps not quite enough of an evolution to take their vision to the next level.
• Mother of Flies is on Shudder and AMC+ from 23 January.
