You Are Not My Mother (2021)

Teenager Char (Hazel Doupe) lives with her mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken), her grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie) and her uncle Aaron (Paul Reid) in a housing estate in Dublin. Quiet, intelligent, and sad, Char’s the favourite victim of her school’s bullies. At home, she has trouble coping with Angela’s clinical depression. She’s rather close to her grandma, though, and the general vibe of her family life is very strained but not fatally so.

Things take a strange turn when Angela disappears mysteriously, only to reappear just as mysteriously a short time later. Clearly, something must have happened to her, for after her return, she at first seems rather more lively and healthy than she had been for quite some time, so much so that Char is at first happy to see these changes in her mother. But something’s not quite right with her behaviour. Angela seems to be missing some of the cues of normal social behaviour, at the very least. Going by the looks Rita gives her daughter, the old lady suspects something rather terrible that hasn’t anything to do with mental illness; and given how Aaron assists her in things like hindering Angela from going away with Char for a weekend, he shares these suspicions. Obviously, things are only going to get worse from here on out.

Writer-director Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother is a highly accomplished example of how to mix social realism with folk (or at least folklore based) horror. I don’t believe it is a spoiler to say that it is yet another variation on changeling folklore; it is also pretty much the best film I’ve seen using this particular part of Irish folklore. That’s not just because the film varies the tale’s typical structure by using a mother instead of a child as the spirited away and replaced part of a family, but because Dolan uses this change to explore usually unexplored and unspoken dynamics between children and parents, dynamics that are changed but not stripped of love and true human connection by mental illness.

Indeed, that last part is one of the film’s greatest strengths. It does use its supernatural threat to explore how depression can change familial relations and the toll mental illness takes on those of us suffering from it as well as the people who love us, but it never equates the two.

The film’s treatment of the bullying Char suffers is also rather excellent, constructed with an understanding of the differences between various types of bullying demonstrated through a very precise depictions of social subtleties. Dolan is so good at this stuff, she absolutely sells even the part of the story where one of her bullies becomes Char’s friend, something that could be either implausible or mawkish in hands less adept.

The film’s portrayal of poverty is equally excellent. It never shies away from showing poverty – the version of poverty where you’re probably not going to go hungry and homeless but that’s all – but it lacks the sense of touristic wallowing quite a few British films certain critics eat up tend to show, films in which poor people can only be portrayed as suffering 24/7, as if only that would be enough to convince an audience of the intrinsic worth of the poor as human beings. But I digress.

Apart from Dolan’s precise, tight and often cleverly moody direction, the film is further enhanced by some fantastic performances. Doupe’s unsentimental portrayal of all of Char’s hurts, awkwardnesses and pains as well as her strength and the short bursts of teenage joy she is allowed is particularly moving, whereas Bracken very effectively delineates the difference between the depressed mother at the film’s start and the un-human thing that is taking her place.

Which segues nicely into something I haven’t said about You Are Not My Mother until now: it is indeed also a highly effective horror movie, one of those examples of the genre that uses social realism and supernatural horror to open up different ways to talk about difficult things, yet that’s also highly effective as a piece of supernatural horror. Because these aren’t approaches to horror that stand in opposition but, handled well, only strengthen one another. Particularly the final act also simply has a couple of brilliantly effective set pieces.