When we first meet Kathryn Hunter’s terrifying Solange in Max and Sam Eggers’ The Front Room, she’s covered head-to-toe in black, her face obscured by a black veil, and only her hands – each clutching wooden canes – are visible to the naked eye. The revelation of her wizened, fissured face, beckoning her estranged stepson, Norman (Andrew Burnap), and his pregnant wife, Belinda (Brandy Norwood), shocks in its seeming maliciousness, resentment, and bitterness. Later, the same face, barely concealing its smirking malevolence behind societal norms of deference, obedience, and appeasement toward elders, will shock, disgust, and revolt in equal measure.
In any other film, in any other time, or in any other reality, Belinda and Norman would cut and run at the sight of Solange or her odd, disturbing behaviour, leaving Solange to the care of her Charismatic flock (a brand of Evangelical Christianity) or the practiced, expert care of a nursing home or assisted-care facility. Instead, Solange, the sole heir to a small fortune left to her by Norman’s father, insists Belinda and Norman take her into their home. In exchange, Solange promises not only to make Norman her direct beneficiary when she passes from this world into the next, presumably Christian one, but also to cover any costs associated with her care in their home.
It’s a Godfather-style offer Norman and Belinda – both supposedly smart, self-aware millennials – should categorically refuse, but logic, borne of desperation and willful self-delusion, decides for them. Facing financial stress bordering on ruin, the wary couple talk themselves into letting Solange enter their lives, desperately imagining a best-case scenario while ignoring the worst, more likely one.
Following a long tradition in the horror genre, the decision to invite Solange into their home, of course, proves to be disastrous. Almost immediately, Solange, using her perceived frailty and weakness like a weapon, insists on moving into the titular front room – the same room Belinda and Norman have set aside for the newest addition to their family. One concession turns into a second, then a third, and before long, Solange has cleverly manipulated Norman into a state of frustratingly prolonged, childlike passivity and Belinda into Solange’s permanently harried, broken caretaker.
So far, so predictable, but Max and Sam Eggers, knowing full well that horror can turn not just on fear and dread, but disgust and revulsion too, add a level of stomach-flipping outrageousness to Solange’s deliberately erratic behavior. No longer content to appear weak, Solange launches an all-out attack on Belinda involving food, bodily fluids, and excrement, taking obvious pleasure in humiliating Solange. As Norman’s gaslighting takes hold and Belinda’s mental health deteriorates, a struggle, first low-key and later anything but, for the future of Belinda and Norman’s family, begins to take hold.
While The Front Room plays with aspects of the religious, the spiritual, and the supernatural, primarily in Solange’s fringe beliefs, oddly congruent events, and the occasional surreal vision reflecting Belinda’s increasingly fractured psyche, it remains essentially within the realm of the plausible, naturalistic, and most importantly, the psychological. The focus remains squarely on the struggle-turned-war between Solange and Belinda with the ineffectual Norman as one-half of a gendered nuclear family, albeit a more “progressive” one given its interracial status.
Spiked with darkly inflected humor that borders on the offensive, tasteless, and transgressive (minus the border), The Front Room can be a trying, ultimately exhausting experience, but if nothing else, it represents Max and Sam Eggers willingness to provoke, even antagonize their intended audience, partly to shock for shock’s sake, but also to force the audience to confront their implicit biases against older members of our society who, like the fictional Solange, rage against the dying of their light.
The Front Room opens theatrically on Friday, September 6th.