‘The Front Room’ Review: A Horror-Comedy That Isn’t Quite Either

The Front Room, the new horror-comedy from filmmakers Max & Sam Eggers and A24, boasts a strong premise and a game cast, but it’s not particularly scary or funny. It’s surreal, clever, and occasionally visually quirky enough to fit the “indie horror” mold, but a little too unsubtle and user-friendly to feel like arthouse fare. Such a balance is possible — there are episodes of Atlanta, for instance, that represent exactly what The Front Room aims to be — but it isn’t achieved here. The Front Room is a good conversation starter, but part of that conversation is going to be: “Why isn’t it better?”

Brandy Norwood stars as Belinda, an anthropology professor who worries she’ll be stuck at the non-tenured adjunct level forever, especially now that she’s about to have a baby. Tired of being passed over by her school’s administration, Belinda quits, meaning the family now must make do with her husband Norman’s (Andrew Burnap) pay as a public defender. He, too, is in hot pursuit of that fabled big promotion that will allow him to finally make a stable living. Their only chance at keeping their house is to allow Norman’s abusive stepmother Solange (kathryn hunter) to move in. Solange is a fundamentalist Christian who believes that her special relationship with God has granted her supernatural powers, and as frustrating as it would be to have a crazy old lady in your home, there’s an even worse possibility: What if she’s not crazy? What if God is actually on her side?

Solange personifies a cross-section of America’s societal ills. She’s a proud Daughter of the Confederacy but refuses to see why that’s racist. She’s a proud Christian, but her exclusionary and self-serving version of Christianity would baffle the actual Christ. Perhaps most importantly, she is an old woman who refuses to surrender power. The next generation may ascend on her terms or not at all.

Kathryn Hunter endows Solange with a delicious blend of childish buffoonery and genuine menace. Hunter’s performance is huge, practically the same scale this character would have in the context of an Adam Sandler comedy. And yet it often works because Solange herself is a huge ham, the sort of passive-aggressive nightmare who exaggerates her own physical and emotional fragility in order to keep her foes on eggshells. Her movie monsterdom is also embellished via sound design—which turns every step of her cane into a thunderous boom—and by the liberal on-screen depiction of every kind of fluid her body can produce. The Front Room doles out plenty of scatological humor and horror, usually at the same time.

Hunter’s on-screen dominance draws some attention away from Brandy Norwood, the film’s actual lead. Belinda is a meaty role for the pop star/sitcom veteran and she seems equal to the task, but it’s hard to tell, as her relatively quiet performance simply gets blown out by the sheer volume of Hunter’s.

The two stars frequently feel as if they’re in two different movies: Brandy is in a more typical A24 horror-thriller, grappling with layers of situational and generational trauma, while Hunter is in a broader, sillier slapstick or grossout horror-comedy. The attempt to straddle these two moods keeps either of them from taking hold. The Front Room is packed with scary ideas and funny ideas, but no genuinely scary scenes and only a few outright laughs. Instead, its standout moments are all from its grotesque but painterly dream sequences, which feel like they’re chasing after Max & Sam Eggers’ more famous brother, A24 darling Robert Eggers. (Max was co-writer of Robert’s The Lighthouse, and there’s a hint of that film’s psychosexual ickiness here.) They may have been able to pull off one or even two of these tones, but all three together are not working.

Thus, there are probably three better versions of The Front Room that could be made from the exact same screenplay, and it’s hard not to spend the hours after watching it thinking about the movies it could have been. Critics are meant to avoid judging a film for what it isn’t, and to let the film tell us how it should be enjoyed and evaluated. The Front Room has a clear narrative, a clear point of view, and a clear message, but no clear avenue for approach. Should it be funnier? Should it be scarier? Should it be more abstract or opaque? The answer to any one of these questions is “Yes.” What you’re left with is a movie that leaves a lot to be desired.