Metacritic reviews

Imaginative and spooky, You Are Not My Mother shows just how frightening — and stigmatizing — a parent’s mental illness can be to a child.

For much of its impressive duration, Dolan’s film blurs the line between family friction, bipolar disorder and the supernatural.

Steeped in local folklore, it lets mythic and mind-based terrors exist side by side, allowing the viewer to interpret and believe what they will. This leeway comes at no cost, however, to its effective atmospherics, which sink into the bones like an unexpected twilight chill.

With striking scares, moody atmosphere, and impressive performances, You Are Not My Mother gradually reveals itself to be a wicked, wicked work of horror, with perhaps only a few unanswered questions holding it back from true greatness.

The final sequences are the only "stock" moments in this very specific family drama, and something about the last scene left me cold. But the rest is so effective and emotional, a dedicated portrait of trauma passed down through generations, it doesn't matter.

Brimming with potential that it doesn’t exactly follow through on, You Are Not My Mother is nonetheless another aesthetically rich horror film that clearly mines an individual’s personal history.

While Bracken helps create the nightmarish mood, Doupe is left to suffer its wrath and humanize the ordeal by struggling to readily believe the unfathomable.

The frights are muted, but the air of dread that hangs over Irish writer-director Kate Dolan’s debut feature makes it an immersive experience, one anybody with “mother issues” will quickly identify with.

Intense performances by Doupe and Bracken give it a real emotional pulse.

The primacy that it places on its dopamine drip of dread undercuts whatever genuine commitment it might have toward mental illness and trauma.