Frightfest 2021: Motherly

Dir: Craig David Wallace

It’s Beth’s (Tessa Kozma) 9th birthday, but she’s far from happy, spending it with her mother Kate (Lora Burke) in an isolated farmhouse, living in witness protection. Beth wants to see her father, but he’s in prison for the murder of one of his daughter’s friends. Late that night, Kate and Beth’s home is invaded by a couple bent on vengeance.

Home invasion films are often effective because of their claustrophobia; they tend to trap characters at odds with each other in a relatively confined space, drawing tension out from the feeling of being trapped with them. There are, despite a slightly wider canvas, aspects of this in Motherly, but it's notable that they begin before the home invasion aspect of the film starts. The house that Kate and Beth are stuck in is fairly spacious, it has a garden and a barn, but we still find them both feeling hemmed in by their space and the situation that has put them there. The tension between mother and daughter is felt right from the start, as a slightly bratty Beth is ungrateful for her birthday present and cake, and disobeys her mother by hiding in the barn. This feeling of being stuck in confinement with a difficult child is likely to be pretty familiar to parents, given the events of the last 18 months, and it builds the characters and their situation effectively before the real horror descends.

Lora Burke and Tessa Kozma both give committed and believable performances as the mother and daughter. Kate’s stress at financial worries, dealing with her daughter, and the fact that Beth doesn’t seem to entirely grasp why her father can’t be with them is palpable, but so, in the latter part of the film, is her absolute devotion to protecting her. For Kozma’s part, she makes Beth a realistically stroppy and perhaps traumatised, kid.

After an opening half-hour that largely lays character groundwork (also introducing us to Hal (Colin Paradine) Kate’s witness protection liaison, who she’s been sleeping with), the film moves into its home invasion section. Kristen MacCulloch and Nick Smyth have more emotion to play than the usual faceless bad guys we see in these films (notably, ironically, the ones Lora Burke came up against in 2020’s For The Sake of Vicious), and they bring real dimension to the parts.

However, there is one central element of the story that Craig David Wallace and his co-writer Ian Malone clearly want to keep as a big twist. Unfortunately, not only is it wildly obvious from the storytelling, but one particular shot choice relatively early on signposts it incredibly clearly. If you work that revelation out (and there’s little chance you won’t), the whole home invasion section—well directed and performed though it is—can feel rather redundant.

On the whole, Motherly is a solid debut film, but one that feels very much like a debut. Wallace is clearly adept at working with actors, drawing decent performances from his entire cast and his direction also often shows both style and impact; an understanding of the subgenre he’s working in. Where the film falls down is in the overly signposted screenplay, Wallace and Malone lay the themes in effectively enough, but they undermine themselves because by letting us see where everything is going to end up long before the film gets to that would-be shock they neuter the scares and the tension. It’s a shame because there’s real promise here, but the whole ends up rather less than the sum of its parts.

★★½