Three times a man asks the Prophet Muhammad who most deserves his good company, and three times the answer comes back the same: your mother. Only on the fourth asking does it become your father. Filmmaker Bassam Tariq takes his title from that hadith and builds his entire film in the space it leaves. The result is the most startling thing in theatres this year: a blood-soaked crime thriller in which the thing everyone is chasing turns out to be milk.
Latif (Mahershala Ali) is a hitman and devout Muslim, and the film refuses to treat those as a contradiction to be resolved. He is finishing a job when the call comes that his wife has died. He flies home to Houston, to a funeral at his mosque, to three children he has spent years not quite raising: a sardonic teenage daughter, Fatiha (Adia), a solemn young son, Qadir (Jahleel Kamara), and an infant who will not take formula. There is a day or two of breast milk in the freezer. After that, nothing. That is the clock the film runs on.
It is a magnificent premise, and Tariq knows what he has. Thrillers are usually organized around a briefcase, a ledger, a name. Here the prize is nourishment, and the chase is a father crossing a city to feed a baby while men with guns phone him about a body he left in a bathroom. The stakes never stop being enormous, and never stop being domestic. Few films grasp so well that the most frightening thing a man can face is a hungry child and an empty fridge.
Ali is extraordinary. He plays Latif as a man running several lives at once and bleeding between them. He is coldly blank at work, undone at the funeral, white-hot when his children are touched, and occasionally, beautifully, just a tired dad. He gets a laugh out of dismissing his daughter’s browser history as “chipmunk nonsense” clouding her heart, and it costs the character nothing. It is a performance of enormous range that never announces itself as one.
The ensemble is just as good. John Cho is terrifying as Hwan Yoon, a preacher who survived an IED in Iraq because, he says, his mother prayed him back — a man who seizes places he deems sinful and calls the taking a rescue. Cho plays him with the warmth of someone who believes it, which is far worse than menace. Adia is a real discovery, swinging from smirking adolescent contempt to devastation without a seam. Kamara is wonderfully grave. Giancarlo Esposito and Tramell Tillman make small roles land hard, and Abubakr Ali and Tiffany Boone find real hurt under broad characters.
Katelin Arizmendi (Swallow, Cam) shoots Houston as a sweaty, neon-smeared sprawl, and finds real beauty in it without ever tidying it up. The action sequences are stunning, and the comedy is sharp enough to make the violence worse rather than lighter.
Then there is the faith, which the film carries beautifully. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is deeply religious and never once preachy, because it argues through character rather than dialogue. Yoon is faith as conquest, charismatic and certain and expanding. Latif is faith as obligation, a compromised man who keeps turning up for prayer because the appointed times do not care what kind of day he is having. The film is interested in hypocrisy, forgiveness and what belief costs when it is inconvenient, and it trusts audiences to do the work.
It also asks for a healthy suspension of disbelief. Public bloodshed goes strangely unpoliced, and events pile up well past plausibility. None of it matters, because the film is not operating as realism. It is a folk tale, a parable with a body count, and read that way its logic is airtight.
The only real misstep here is pacing. The closing stretch reaches several places that feel like endings before finding the one it wants, and that makes a tight film briefly feel long. Editor Cam McLauchlin may well have intended the stutter. The ending Tariq chooses is the best of them, though, and genuinely moving, though it walks past a few exits to get there.
That is a small complaint about a tremendous film. Tariq has made something funny, violent, tender, and devout all at once, and it doesn’t resemble anything else this year.
