I recently watched a fascinating three-hour documentary on Shudder entitled Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, and it left me wanting to check out more movies from that genre, of which I’ve been exposed to very few examples.
Luckily I was assigned to attend last week’s ScreamFest Los Angeles opening-night screening of Hulu’s new original feature film Matriarch, which was introduced at the festival as folk horror.
Matriarch was written and directed by British filmmaker Ben Steiner, who as far as I can tell had only made shorts prior to this (in addition to something called Monsterland 2). It focuses on a trainwreck of a 40-something alcoholic drug-addict near-suicidal advertising executive named Laura (played by the talented Jemima Rooper of 2006’s The Black Dahlia), who returns to her seemingly quaint childhood village to stay with her estranged mother Celia (the wickedly good-at-playing-evil Kate Dickie from Game of Thrones and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus) after a sudden near-death incident causes her to finally go off the rails. Laura knows there’s something off about her mother from the get-go– there were reasons she ran away as a young woman and never looked back until now– but because she’s basically hit rock bottom, she needs to give her the benefit of the doubt and try making the best of a bad situation. But Celia isn’t the only thing that’s off about her home town. There’s a childhood friend (House of Anubis star Sarah Paul) who is seemingly stalking Laura, and the rest of the townsfolk who aren’t behaving any less suspiciously– never mind the fact that many of the older residents look as though they haven’t aged a day since our protagonist ran away 20 years earlier.
As the story unfolds, of course, we learn more about what’s really going on here, and I won’t spoil anything more than to say it involves an eerie marsh out in the woods and a disgusting black goo coming and going from a variety of orifices (Anyone remember the oily alien entity from The X-Files? This brought to mind that mid-90s TV phenomenon.) Yes, things get gross in Matriarch and the movie sometimes verges on becoming body horror, but where it really succeeds is in building tension and creepy atmosphere. I like that Steiner gives us little hints of the truth as we, and Laura, as our surrogate, peek into the lives of the eccentric townspeople– and mostly of Celia herself. There are also quite a few moments in this film that deliver imagery I won’t soon forget: a woman lying unconscious on a bathroom floor as the aforementioned black ooze seeps toward her, an otherworldly presence in the dark back corner of a neglected greenhouse, a man submerging himself sans-clothes in a moonlit bog, etc. The look of this movie is right up my alley, and it sets an uncanny tone that carries through for the entirety of the film.
“I never hurt you… physically,” says Celia when Laura confronts her mother about her mistreatment as a child. And the relationship between these two characters is absolutely the heart and soul of Matriarch. It helps that they’re both played by such compelling and mesmerizing actresses, and directed with a deft hand by Steiner (who confessed during the ScreamFest Q&A that he had to conduct the production from the inside of his car for a week due to being diagnosed with COVID-19). The first two-thirds of this movie are so well-constructed and deliberately executed that I actually started to wonder if and when it would begin to let me down. The answer came in the third act, which gets to be overly rushed and even a little silly for my tastes– I loved the grounded slow burn of the first hour, but as soon as the true nature of this village is revealed things become a little too out-there.
Don’t get me wrong: the climax of Matriarch is never less than interesting. I just think that once the situation starts to devolve, it deteriorates at too fast of a rate to sustain the apprehension and suspense that the film had built up by that point. In a way all that effort almost feels squandered by a hurried and outlandish finale. But I will say that I enjoyed the movie overall (especially the performances and the mood-setting, as mentioned above) and Ben Steiner has definitely caught my attention as a filmmaker. I will absolutely be on the lookout for whatever he does next, and I will recommend Matriarch to those who aren’t afraid to get a little grossed out, and who are curious to find out what this folk horror thing is all about.
My grade: 3 ½ out of 5 questionable glasses of water
Matriarch will be released on Friday, October 21st, exclusively via Hulu.