Matriarch

This movie is wayyyy too good to be rated in the 4s and if you read the reviews you can tell the people writing them aren't real horror fans. The bad reviews for this movie seem like they're coming from Hulu watchers looking for fuller house or something.. I love horror movies and know how hard it is to get my hands on a decent one at this point so I think this movie deserves some credit. Having said that..

This film is a very dark folklore esq tale "hints of films like ritual, hereditary, and the witch". Matriarch depicts alcohol and drug abuse with a great sense of realism as well as showing us a broken mother/daughter relationship that feels very familiar to real life.

I think the concept applied in this film was very fresh and executed intelligently. It felt sort of taboo to watch at times in a good way.. like I shouldn't be seeing this but I'm so glad I get to peer in on this dark and dangerous world from the safety of my living room. The actors gave top notch performances as well.. couldn't have asked for more there. Very good horror movie. B+ from me.

First off, Jemima Rooper is entirely awful to observe throughout the whole film. She's dreadful and not in a good way. She's a miserable, atrocious mess of a disaster from the start. The first third of the movie is all about her and her nasty habits and behavior.

Then she goes home to her mother, played by the always-awesome Kate Dickie. And then you kinda see why the daughter is a loathsome person. But by contrast, Kate Dickie can portray appalling without being unconscionably annoying.

Then it turns into a Village of the Wicker Song kinda thing, I guess. The reveal of what is going with the townspeople is a big "um, okay".

The special effects are cheesy in places.

The fudge looked good. Better than the film which, sadly, Kate Dickie can't save.

Intriguing beginning. Story contains good mix of mystery with supernatural horror for the first 4/5ths, but the end and the story is very unsatisfactory. The draw-in is good but Is almost as if they ran out money and concluded amongst poor lighting and severely curtail final scenes. Another way to put it was that critical scenes near the end are missing. Also, on a fear/suspense scale it's falls flat all throughout. I enjoyed the pace of the mystery and unraveling backstory. The acting is ok to good. The few special effects probably were poor so they resolve it by by under exposing, the problem is that I couldn't tell what happened in the the in the climax and the parts we do see clearly, there's no explanation.

Very interesting tale of a binge-drinking, cocaine-snorting city type on the verge of a breakdown, visiting her rural-dwelling mother for a very difficult reunion. There's the spectre of a mysteriously deceased father, mentions of the Olde Ways, and the obligatory not-as-harmless-as-they-seem villagers. The first and third acts could be from completely different films, yet it just about works, as both mother/daughter drama and countryside weirdness are dark and intriguing.

Matriarch also largely avoids sudden shocks for the slowly emerging realisation of terror, whilst mixing in unsettling visuals and details which only become clear later on. The central performances are great; Jemima Rooper bravely makes her character spiteful and unlikeable yet still somehow sympathetic, whilst Kate Dickie as her mum is subtly yet unmistakably wrong from the outset, and it just escalates from there. Wonderfully bleak scenery as well; frosty churchyards and desolate roads that don't seem to lead to anywhere.

There's a really great core idea here and an overall solid story that with just a few minor tweaks could've made an absolute classic, but there's something hard to define that's not quite worked.

I can't figure out if it's the characters, the acting, the editing, or what, but for some reason I couldn't connect and wasn't absorbed on an emotional level - there was no character I was rooting for, none I was rooting against. Someone died and it was acknowledged, but I didn't care.

And if I'm not feeling something emotionally, it loses a major part of the battle for me. The brain parts of the people behind this got everything just about right, but the heart parts I think got left at home.