FrightFest review – Mother of Flies

FrightFest review – Mother of Flies

Since The Deeper You Dig and H6llb6nd6r, ‘the Adams Family’ – John Adams, Toby Poser and Zelda Adams, who write, direct, edit and act together, plus creating the score with their band H6llb6nd6r – have branched out to make larger-scale films with more collaborators, Where the Devil Roams and Hell Hole.  Mother of Flies reverts to ‘family only’ – albeit with a one-scene bit for additional Adams, Lulu – as the principle trio are onscreen alone, albeit in striking natural surroundings, for the bulk of the film and the story is entirely wrapped up in their characters and even their personal history.

Mickey (Zelda Adams), a teenage student, is terminally ill with a cancer which has proved untreatable by conventional means.  Jake (John Adams), her father, drives her out into the woods for a three-day session with Solveig (Toby Poser), a healer who isn’t so much New Age as Classic Witch.  Indeed, Solveig seems to have been living in her house – woven out of the forest the way the gingerbread house was made of sweets – for centuries, and a cairn of stones on her property may have taken more than a normal lifetime to build.  For Mickey, this is a last hope – and sceptical John doesn’t have the heart to dismiss the possibility of magic, even as he wonders whether the torments of three days with the alarming Solveig, who only offers scavenged forest refreshments which might be either poisonous or hallucinogenic or both, are just compounding inevitable pain with unendurable cruelty.

Mother of Flies is a witch in the woods story, and Poser – who has a nicely creepy bit in Blood Shine – makes Solveig a genuinely disturbing presence … ruthlessly pursuing her own agenda, which might include vengeance against a long-ago community who turned against her, while also perhaps genuinely trying to help the helpless Mickey.  A rather sweet aspect of the Adams’ filmography is that each of the principles in turn gets a meaty lead role while the others offer support – this time, Poser throws herself into what might be a signature role, and perhaps revisits some aspects of her character in H6llb6nd6r.  Mother of Flies is a small-scale film but doesn’t feel cheap – in its evocation of a magical, earthy, threatening forest, it’s on a par with Lars von Trier’s Antichrist or Robert Eggers’ The Witch, with rot, decay, squirming maggots and clouds of insects as well as the beauties of twisted trees and the herbal larder and pharmacy.  Solveig points out that chemo and radio therapies make you a lot sicker before they have a chance to make you well – and her particular strain of wild magic has very similar properties.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.