Max and Sam Eggers’ debut, the hagsploitation flick The Front Room, had me at a loss for words at least a dozen times. That is not necessarily a compliment. Despite being billed as a horror-comedy, the primary emotion The Front Room elicits is one of sheer disbelief. The Front Room is, quite literally, a shit show. But that is less an insult than a fact of the movie’s runtime: the majority of the film depicts an elderly woman soiling herself to dunk on her step-son’s wife. (That being said, it fits that definition in a figurative sense as well.)
Imagine the base themes of filmmaker Michael Haneke’s Amour—the unimaginable horror of watching an aging loved one deteriorate in real time, their body and mind crumbling under the weight of time itself—but reimagined by a boardwalk cartoonist: tone-deaf and skid-marked, stilted and overwrought. There is so much that can be mined from the terrifying experience of aging, but The Front Room is decidedly uninterested in everything that wellspring of tragedy has to offer—save for incontinence, and that is something (perhaps the only thing) it is very, very interested in.
The plot is simple, and thoroughly telegraphed the whole way through: anthropology professor and expecting mother Belinda (played by a belly-bumped Brandy, who does her best with the lackluster script) is understandably fed up with her department’s callous disregard. Less understandably (especially considering the hellhole that is the current academic job market), she promptly quits on the spot not five minutes into the film, as a result of being stood up for a single meeting with the department chair. Consequently, she and her husband Norman (a flat Andrew Burnap) struggle to make ends meet, even though Norman is (to paraphrase about 75% of Burnap’s dialogue) about to get a promotion, babe, I promise.
A solution to the not-quite-happy couple’s financial burdens soon presents itself, in the form of Norman’s hyper-religious, abusive stepmother. Kathryn Hunter’s Solange, who was cursed by a witch to only speak like Senator Claghorn, offers the pair a deal: she’ll leave them her hefty inheritance if they allow her to live in their house for her last few months (or years) alive. Despite Norman’s hesitation, Bedelia accepts the seemingly generous offer and, at Solange’s request, transforms the nursery they had built for their child-to-be into Solange’s new abode. After all, how bad could this monster-in-law possibly be?
Black-veiled and gummily grinning, Hunter is nothing short of committed as Solange, every bit as ludicrous, dedicated, and shameless as any cult classic Nicolas Cage role. Hunter’s performance is The Front Room’s chief and—apart from some well-framed tableaus (courtesy of cinematographer Ave Berkofsky)—only asset.
Through Solange, the Eggers brothers aim at four different verticals to evoke psychological dread throughout the film, without really succeeding at any of them: our innate fears of 1) racism, 2) inconclusively supernatural Catholicism, 3) invasive figures turning your loved ones against you, seeking to replace you in your own life and 4) weaponized incontinence. The first three have all been done before, and done far better. As for the fourth…The Front Room presents a convincing argument as to why it hasn’t been done. (It seems that poop does not, in fact, do much to raise one’s heart rate, just one’s half-digested dinner). It’s entertaining, sure, but there’s only so many times you can watch an elderly woman scream about her “M-E-DOUBLE-S-MESS!” before wondering why it is you’re watching at all.
The Eggers brothers aren’t particularly subtle with any of this, either. The aforementioned ideas are approached with a heavy hand and a penchant for gauche imagery: there’s the shot of Solange as a living room Holy Mary surrounded by a cult of elderly disciples draped in black, there’s that time she covers her bewigged head with a white napkin and screams “I’m a racist baby, goo-goo gah-gah” (I wish I was making this up), there’s the dream sequence that sees her feeding her grown son milk straight from her chest. Despite The Front Room’s unusual dearth of blood and/or violence, it still manages to fall prey to one of the genre’s classic pitfalls: it consistently prioritizes shock over value.
While one can see the intention to unflinchingly portray the surreal experience of aging in all its horror, misery, and even humor in The Front Room, the resulting moments are little more than palimpsests, written over a movie that could’ve been yet wasn’t. Any greater purpose beyond the gags (of both the humor and the oh-god-I-might-puke variety) is visible only in traces, only when you squint. It feels like an infinite loop of rock-paper-scissors: The Front Room’s attempts at horror are thwarted by its attempts at campy humor, its attempts at campy humor thwarted by its attempts at thematic resonance, and its attempts at thematic resonance thwarted by its shock-value horror. Everyone’s a loser.
The psycho-biddy genre is a long-standing one, and the debates surrounding it are just as storied. While this particular entry into the hagsploitation canon doesn’t feel disrespectful to the actress playing its central “hag” (if anything, it’s a tour-de-force for Hunter), most of the other typical criticisms apply wholesale. The Front Room is less a cathartic depiction of time’s devolution of the body and mind than it is a film that is itself afraid of the aging female body, which is demonized and caricatured. It’s very hard to imagine a version of this film in which Solange could be replaced by Norman’s stepfather.
The Front Room operates under a juvenile understanding of both humor and fear, specifically one that defines the pinnacle of each as an elderly white woman shitting herself, then making a Black woman clean up after her. That mindset is the crux of the film’s failure, and not even because of the rancid political undercurrents it never manages to satisfyingly dissect. As a result of its fundamentally callow worldview, The Front Room is less scary than scared—not of aging but of those who have already aged.
Director: Max Eggers, Sam Eggers
Writers: Max Eggers, Sam Eggers
Cast: Brandy, Kathryn Hunter, Andrew Burnap, Neal Huff
Release Date: September 6, 2024
Casey Epstein-Gross is a New York based writer and critic whose work can be read in Paste, Observer, The A.V. Club, Jezebel, and other publications. She can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television, film, music, politics, or any one of her strongly held opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on Twitter or email her at [email protected].