The opening scene of Irish writer/director Kate Dolan's assured, atmospheric debut feature You Are Not My Mother is so intensely unsettling that it creates a sense of foreboding that inexorably draws you in.
It's a clever device that is representative of the director's talent for deftly setting the scene while leaving the audience guessing. There is much to question over the film's hour-and-a-half runtime.
Steeped in Irish folklore, the film effectively explores themes of mental illness and generational family trauma through the prism of horror.
Our central protagonist is the quiet, studious teenager Char (Hazel Doupe). She lives with her mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken) and grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie), but it soon becomes clear all is not well under the roof of their drab suburban Dublin house.
Angela is a withdrawn and unresponsive mother who has become mostly bedbound while battling an unnamed mental illness. After briefly going missing one day, Angela returns to the family home suspiciously changed – a more spirited, upbeat and unpredictable version of herself.
Char desperately wants to embrace and connect with her newly revived mother, but slowly events start taking a dark turn.
Her superstitious granny is full of warnings, but is she to be trusted? And what about Aaron (Paul Reid), her tense, gruff uncle?
The central performances give the subject matter, which expertly weaves the supernatural with the everyday, great emotional heft. The hugely talented Hazel Doupe is quietly devastating as Char, her impassive expressions conveying so much turmoil under the surface.
Carolyn Bracken embodies the duality of Angela with ease, infusing the performance with an animalistic energy, while Ingrid Craigie gives the audience pause as the ambiguous granny.
You Are Not My Mother is a tightly-edited, effective and unnerving chiller that hints at great things ahead for emerging writer-director Dolan.
