The Front Room (2024) Review

The Front Room (2024)
Director: Max Eggers, Sam Eggers
Screenwriters: Max Eggers, Sam Eggers
Starring: Brandy, Andrew Burnap, Neal Huff, Kathryn Hunter

A24 is a company that, when it comes to horror, doesn’t necessarily go for jump scares. They’re the production company that always try to take an idea and put as much atmosphere and intellectualism into it as they can, even if it doesn’t always work. Usually, when you go into a film made by A24, you’re going to at least get a quality product, even if it isn’t to your taste.

The Front Room seemingly bucks this trend, because it is almost impossible to decipher whether the film is actually an A24 film or not, given its relative lack of all things A24.

The film stars Brandy and Andrew Burnap as a couple struggling to make ends meet with a baby on the way, and details their attempts to hold onto their lives as Burnap’s deeply religious mother-in-law, Solange (played by Kathryn Hunter), moves into the house in exchange for financial security. The couple try to cling to the rocky ledge of sanity for dear life as Solange slowly begins to wheedle her way in, driving Brandy’s Belinda out of the way so that she can be the mother to the whole family.

In The Front Room, Kathryn Hunter is the best of the bunch when it comes to the on-screen talent, her ability with physical acting paying dividends in the role she fulfils. Her use of her character’s crutches is similar to the crutches the actors playing the apes for the recent Planet of the Apes films use, the props being extensions of herself that give a bestial dimension to her motion. She is this film’s standout.

Directors Max and Sam Eggers (brothers to Robert Eggers of The Witch fame, Max himself a co-writer on The Lighthouse) try, as directors, to do what they can to make their fairly bland adaptation of Susan Hill’s original story more interesting, but most of the time their visuals are distracting and/or invasive. There are only so many mirror shots you can have in a film before it feels like the directors are simply trying to come up with something interesting to add spice to a dull palette, and there are ninety minutes of fairly rinse-and-repeat purple prose here.

This communicates a distinct lack of confidence. This drives any kind of enjoyment out of the film. There are elements of a traditional ghost story hidden deep in The Front Room, and with author Susan Hill being the mastermind behind The Woman In Black, it’s astonishing that the brothers didn’t go down a similar route to that film; a traditional ghost story, heavy on atmosphere and chills, like Rebecca (1940) with a sense of menacing evil rather than pettiness.

There’s an indecision as to where the film wants to go with its representation of evil. Solange might be Satanic, with the whole film a strange, external portrayal of a demonic-possession film. She could also just be ordinary and we’re seeing unusual, hallucinatory things. Who knows? Certainly the film doesn’t have an opinion on the matter. And if the film doesn’t have an idea of what’s going on, what chance do we?

And still, the direction isn’t awful all of the time. The acting isn’t awful all of the time, either. On occasion, the acting is actually quite good. The idea behind the story is good, too. But the score by Marcelo Zavros does so much of the heavy lifting trying to create an air of malice and evil and danger that it is apparent the filmmakers were worried from the start. By the time the finale rolls around, it is such a monumental anti-climax that you have to scan your memory banks in case you missed something.

The Front Room is so utterly devoid of anything emotionally or intellectually engaging that any genuine talent or ability or craft is lost. It is perfectly possible to come out of the screen and into the open air, then turn around and walk in to see the film again having forgotten you were just there.

Score: 8/24

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