Kathryn Hunter as Solange in The Front Room [Jon Pack/© Pink Chair Productions LLC]

THE FRONT ROOM
Directed by Sam and Max Eggers
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆

THERE is no let-up in the constant churn of horror releases. The facts speak for themselves: at least 10 per cent of films released each year sit firmly in the horror genre.

And one constant of such films is how they reflect society’s fears at any given time: horror films in 1950s America focused on a subconscious fear of Communism, for example. In recent years societal breakdown and climate crisis chaos have prompted horror films that reveal the sense of lack of control over our lives in the modern world. It has given us nihilistic movies such as The Purge and The Road.

Horrors with jump-scares, aimed mainly at a teenage audience, are by far and away the biggest genre released. Studios are constantly creating the all-encompassing slasher flick, which tends to draw on 1980s horror influences.

But there are directors such as Ari Aster, who has drawn on folk tales that are deeply ingrained in western society, and scare us through Judeo-Christian myths. Aster’s Hereditary, the greatest contemporary horror film ever made, is a prime example.

The Front Room tries to place itself in that particular niche: using religious symbolism that is so recognisable as the basis for the scares. Its lead nasty is a mother-in-law from a MAGA-fuelled hell, a God-bothering hypocrite with an evil streak that the Eggers brothers, who directed the film, illustrate rather disappointingly by making her elderly body a focus of disgust. Is this a take on the dangers of a Theocratic Trumpian government?

Belinda (Brandy Norwood) is a put-upon academic, an anthropologist who doesn’t command respect from her students or her colleagues.

Husband Norman (Andrew Burlap) is estranged from his family and when we are introduced to his stepmother Solange (Kathryn Hunter), the reasons are clear.

Norman’s father has died – and Solange proposes that if the couple allow her to move in with them, she will make them the sole beneficiaries of her large estate. So in she moves to their creepy old mansion, and of course things go weird.

Solange is by far and away the most interesting of characters – a reactionary Fox News type of misery guts, raised with the fear of a vicious and nasty God bearing down on her every move. She comes over as the prime Maga constituent. She has an all-seeing eye. She breaks wind in an aggressive manner (really). And she of course thinks Belinda is a terrible mother and she can do so much better.

Scary stuff, indeed.