The 2021 Irish film You Are Not My Mother, directed by Kate Dolan, is a moody and frightening horror movie with very little reliance on special effects to deliver its creepy story. The protagonist Char played by actress Hazel Doupe, is a schoolgirl living in a less than affluent home with her emotionally fragile and mostly bedridden mother Angela played by Carolyn Bracken and her grandmother Rita played by Ingrid Craigie. What appears to be a case of bi-polar disorder for Char’s mother, reveals itself to be something much more sinister.
The movie opens with a startling scene of the Grandmother Rita placing the infant Char within a circle of fire while the baby cries. It may seem to us viewers as though we are witnessing a crime, but the movie jumps forward, and we see the young adult Char with a scar on her face. She has survived the fire, but we now have the sense that there is a family secret.
One morning, Angela, Char’s mother climbs out of bed to drive her to school while Char asks her mother to go shopping. They need food in the house. Char’s mother, already fragile, grips the steering wheel and repeats, “I can’t do this anymore” and nearly runs into an errant draft horse standing in the middle of the road. Char grabs the wheel and runs the car off the road into a field in the nick of time and then shocked and disgusted, walks the rest of the way to school. That same day Char’s mother disappears but the wrecked car is found still sitting in the field. Police don’t seem to be very concerned about filing a missing person’s report and Char begins to have disturbing dreams about her mother only to wake up and find that she has wandered back into the house. What appears to be Angela has anything but the family’s best interest at heart.
It is at this point that the slow burn of the movie begins to take up pace. Up until now, the drab color scheme of Char’s surroundings and the dark furnishings of the family’s home have contributed to the atmosphere while giving it an earthy and gritty feel. The decor, the old radio and music suggest a time perhaps in the mid-seventies. We have been allowed to piece together the story elements and get a feel for Char’s character, for her self-contained pain, and the evolving relationship she has with the bullies at her school.
Irish folklore runs a heavy thread throughout the plot. I don’t like writing spoilers, but I can see how a non-Irish person or someone who isn't familiar with mythology might miss an important detail that makes this movie what it is. Faery is integral to Irish folklore. It is closely tied to nature and dwells either underground in a literal sense or in an interdimensional space. Its residents are otherworldly, non-human, and sometimes unfriendly and dangerous. Forget your visions of Tinkerbell or delicate Victorian fairies flitting in a garden.
Changelings in Irish folklore were the faery people’s replacement for a human child. We could call it an exchange, but if so, it is a poor one. A changeling may look like the human child it replaced, but it would be sickly, fitful and wither away. Subjecting it to fire and iron is said to compel it to reveal its true nature and flee, possibly up the chimney. There are folkloric accounts of children and mothers being taken by the Faery, which is important to this movie’s plot.
Angela’s behavior becomes inhumanly strange as she tries to get closer to her daughter. There is a terrifying Rumpelstiltskin like episode, if you are familiar with the fate of that little German goblin in its fit of rage, when Char’s “mother” becomes angered. It is coincidentally just days before Halloween, or we should say, Samhain. While Char is on a field trip to a heritage site, we can hear the automated tour guide speak about liminal spaces. Halloween is the thin line between the living and the dead, or between the seen and the unseen. According to Irish folklore the gathering of the menacing variety of faery was referred to as the unseelie court, and Halloween or Samhain as it is traditionally known, is the perfect liminal space/time for otherworldly beings to travel and shift between dimensional planes.
The plot takes a murderous turn when Char’s grandmother Rita tries to tell her the truth that Char cannot accept when she sees her mother restrained upstairs. “We need to wake her up, bring her to a fire, see if she turns”, says Rita. I recommend watching this movie to see what happens when Char frees her mother from her restraints, and on the night of Samhain, must do the unthinkable. This is a movie that will make you think about what comes from those liminal spaces, and how our deceased family is just on the other side of the veil ready to step through and help us.