The Front Room: On the risk of sounding as if the review is placed in the year of our lord October 2024, which in actual fact would turn out to be the case within October 2025. As for exactly if it would be placed in the October’s case – shelf labels, there is a lot of this word that is spoken with this word these days – nepo-baby for instance.
And true, for eg, with Hollywood nepotism as the children and daughters of often nikchukocyte generation of industry insiders actors producers and directors crisscross criss-crossing generations relative to this certainly like parent-child, little notice is given to the neo-sipping leprosy siblings. Here comes The Front Room, loud and relentless first film from first timers who call themselves the Eggers brothers.
An equally green directing team whose greatest claim to fame till now is that they are related to one of the most sought after horror film protagonists in the past 10 years, more applicable directed, a so-called Egger brothers’ team does not include famous Robert Egger ik Witch, The Lighthouse as neither include vexed brother Sam Irvin, but rather pertains to his half siblings’ – Sam and Max Egger.
The Front Room is certainly not the order where laser sharp command over the craft of horror that would ensure it has been people slavering at the thought of the forthcoming Nosferatu which it itself novel, Robert’s siblings do however have their own peculiar passion for. Not that it comes out more a resonant clan psychodrama style archetype.
This is what makes the story of Belinda (Brandy) and Norman (Andrew Burnap) and of how they get involved with and share their lives with criminals much than just a psych of normal family members such father, mother and children rather than how they share life and family with and indeed interact.
Norman is shocked to learn of his father’s death. He and a heavily pregnant Belinda, both have jobs but fight every month to make ends meet for their new family soon to come, are offered a solution. NormanÖs widowed step-mother Solange (Kathryn Hunter) wants all her husband’s assets to be handed to her: they must be numerous for she pays all of them, still one condition is that they bring her to live with her husband’s son and daughter in law.
The trouble is that one of Solange’s most salient traits, which would make any couple, more so one with a baby on the way, climb the walls, is that she combines two even most extreme and sometimes, ones, pushy in-law dominance and religious zealotry.
Adding to the idiosyncrasy of her character, it is even revealed in passing that Solange was a sister of the confederacy that further arouses the viewer’s intrigue. This is an area where The Front Room tries to carve a niche for itself by way of being batshit crazy violent comedy horror that it is.
For the better part of the film, anchored within the confines of the family’s more or less hermit-like dwelling, with only three members of cast in attendance( other supporting actors might come in and step out, but most likely very few and few), the Eggers brothers do let the audience to delve into the discomfort of the situation for all the awkward suffocating that one would imagine so but at the same time try to enhance the comedy about that awkwardness as best as one could.
While it is safe to say it does not succeed all the time, there is nevertheless an element of tightrope walking in respect of the tone between the more visceral dread of the character’s ‘nonchalance’ that is Solange’s racism and the supernatural visions and implications of her behavior as well as the occasional fart joke that does not in itself place this movie completely outside the family tree of the one who directed The Lighthouse.
The majority of this facet’s prevailing comes down to Hunter’s competence, the very fine blend of the bit-player’s captivating a hunched body and haggard voice still taken to her most disturbing and funniest extremes. Clumping her dual canes and bending down all the while grinning sadistic shades, she looks like a praying mantis except maybe it is a more vicious form with her character’s insatiable craving for control of the house.
Slurring her words with an apish Southern accent and straightening her own British sounding voice, Hunter displays a considerable know how of what The Front Room is imagining being, an aspect that helps push the film as far as the Eggers have at times been stuck.
Here, clearly, the writer-directors are engaging in a game that is more about ‘tension and tone’ derived from music. This becomes fully apparent even from the opening titles when there is a musical cue that is quite characteristic of a blend of whistling dixie and UFO landing whistles.
The score given by Marcelo Zavros is quite challenging, given its continuous mixing of tone. However, unlike the Solange character, it is a bullheadedness that may not know how far it can go in terms of success.
The Eggers siblings shift the formulation of the evil in-law narrative by addressing the dynamics of generational trauma in passing. Instead of being the ignorant mama’s boy who is painfully persuaded by everyone that his stepmother is not all bad as she grills aunty Belinda, Norman is clear from the beginning that it is not her who he had such a proud and torturous upbringing that she has had more of her fair share of fundamentalist wannabe nuns, but rather that it is Belinda who persuades him to try out this configuration of spatial and social absence. The self supposedly defended within such arguments demonstrates what appears to be the progressive realization of the reasons for these deviations.
Indeed, while there is room in The Front Room for Sam and Max Eggers to develop their understanding of atmosphere and sonic control to the same level of accuracy that has characterized the growth of their half-brother’s own legacy, it is perhaps the flat lighting and inconsistently rendered otherworldly vision that provides them with a starting point.
One can think of a film as a house: it has an approximate form but it is all over the place and requires structure, warmth and finesse. Most likely, there is a doting stepmother-in-law that Sam and Max require and who will go into battle and annoy the Muses with stormy concepts that eventually have to be thoroughly discarded.
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