Stream It Or Skip It: ‘You Are Not My Mother’ on Hulu, An Irish Folk Horror Tackling the Monster That Is Mental Illness

Now on Hulu, You Are Not My Mother can be described as “Irish folk horror,” which kinda tells us it has the potential to be creepier than regular nondenominational folk horror. (Must be all the overcast skies and pale people.) It’s the feature debut from Kate Dolan, who writes and directs this gloomy tale of a grandmother, mother and daughter who are in the grip of… something. It’s one of those is-it-mental-illness-or-is-it-the-supernatural horror stories designed to get under your skin – which it does pretty well. Here’s why.

YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A baby sits in a stroller. Alone. In the street. At night. First shot of the damn movie, and we’re already tense. It gets worse: The baby’s grandmother fetches the baby and takes the baby to the woods and lights a ring of fire around the baby. Poor baby! Then, the title card, and it’s the present day. The baby is a teenager now – phew – and she wakes up, late for school. Char (Hazel Doupe) needs a ride. Granny (Ingrid Craigie) is still around, and apparently hasn’t been imprisoned by Child Protective Services, but she can’t drive because her leg is acting up today. That leaves Char’s mom, Angela (Carolyn Bracken), who has to be roused from bed. She seems way out of it. “In one of her down moods” is the assessment. There’s an incident on the way to school – Angela spaces out and doesn’t see a black horse in the middle of the road and veers over the curb into the grass at the last second. A near miss.

Char has a scar on her cheek. A burn scar? She says it’s a birthmark. She’s a good kid. Good student. A little withdrawn. Lonely at lunchtime. Some other girls bully her, but her art teacher is sympathetic. There are whispers around town about Granny and Angela and Char. Angela goes missing for a while, which doesn’t help the psst psst psst in peoples’ ears. “I don’t want you talking to her,” says the father of Char’s classmate Suzanne (Jordanne Jones), which is good – Suzanne is one of the bullies. Angela’s brother Aaron (Paul Reid) does what he can, bringing home groceries and Angela’s prescriptions. Granny gives Char a little bundle of knotted twigs filled with green leaves, for “good fortune.” Our assessment so far? Char is the innocent, Angela is clinically depressed, Aaron is trying to hold everything together and Granny might be a witch or something?

As these things always go, things escalate. Angela has wild variations in mood. On one of her upswings, she makes dinner, and Granny purposely knocks it on the floor but makes it sound like an accident. (Maybe they’re better off; it was some type of deep-green sludge in a pot.) Good thing Aaron brought home some chips, eh? And as they eat the chips, Granny and Angela have a dinner-table staredown that’s a lot of invisible lasers and death knives from the eyes. Meanwhile, it’s almost Halloween, Suzanne might not be so bad after all but the other girls are still horrible, and Char goes on a class field trip in which the tour guide gives a lecture on Samhain (that’s pronounced “sow-inn,” thank you) that’s so enthusiastic, you’d expect all the goths to lose their bananas. At home, though, things are still escalating, escalating and we’re getting the sinking feeling that those things won’t get better for Char until they get a whole lot worse.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This movie might not exist without neo-femme-folk frighteners The Witch and Hereditary, and it has the lo-fi atmospheric charm of recent well-made creepers like The Vigil and Amulet.

Performance Worth Watching: Doupe is a superb anchor for a movie that might be adrift without her earnest and empathetic performance.

Memorable Dialogue: Decontextualized: “BURRRRRRRRNNNNNNN IIIIITTTTTTTTTTTT.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Dolan does a lot with limited resources here: Stirs up funereal atmosphere, gets excellent performances from the cast, inspires some dread, aims for metaphor in her story. She gives us a sense of decay in Char’s home, and you can almost smell the stagnant must of old furniture and moldering psychological protoplasm – things left untended for too long. That seeps into Char’s character, who’s meek and uncertain about how she fits into the world. She’s different from the other girls, and is singled out for it.

Those elements provide a sturdy foundation for the story, but there are times when You Are Not My Mother feels underwritten, and perhaps too content to be more of a typical horror tale than a character drama. Dolan gamely depicts an all-too-common – and for some, all-too-relatable – struggle with mental illness, showing how it corrupts this matriarchal line. But that idea is ultimately undermined by a smudgy explanation of the whys and hows of the primary conflict’s origin. It features a how-are-you-gonna-explain-THAT-to-the-authorities conclusion that offers a solution so tidy, the core metaphor crumbles.

But You Are Not My Mother holds up well despite its flaws. Dolan shows an eye for composition and a crafty grip on the film’s tone, which stops just short of being dour and delivers a few hair-raising moments that’ll put a smile on the faces of horrormongers out there – you know who you are, you sickos, because I’m kind of one of you.

Our Call: STREAM IT. You Are Not My Mother has style and ambition, and is a worthy, sort-of-witchy, watch in the ever-crowded horror field.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream You Are Not My Mother on Hulu