https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/screens/2024-09-13/sam-and-max-eggers-open-the-door-to-the-front-room/

Sam and Max Eggers Open the Door to The Front Room

By Richard Whittaker, September 13, 2024, 2:15pm, Picture in Picture

Any dream home can become a nightmare with the wrong guest. That's the twisted moral of The Front Room, the new release from A24. “Everyone can relate to having to bring someone into your life,” filmmaker Sam Eggers said through a grin.

Along with his twin brother, Max, Sam wrote and directed a slow-motion home invasion movie. Adapted from a short story by Susan Hill, The Front Room pits lecturer and pregnant mother Belinda (Brandy Norwood) against her feeble mother-in-law, Solange (Kathryn Hunter), who moves in to her house and causes chaos. But is she merely senile, or does she have more sinister plans?

The original piece, written for the 2016 anthology The Travelling Bag and Other Ghostly Stories, was a more traditional ghost story, but Max and Sam were drawn to its depiction of the constant clash between the two women over who runs the house. While they loved the short story's supernatural aspects, and described it as genuinely terrifying, Max recalled that when the project was pitched to them “what we found personally exciting was that war between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law.”

So when they started writing their script, Sam said, “Grounding it more in that psychological battle of wills felt natural – not stripping away the horror but making it a soup that we could play in.”

In the feverish domestic conflict between two women, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a clear influence, as was The Servant from 1963. Director Joseph Losey's first collaboration with legendary British playwright Harold Pinter, the latter paints a picture of shifting power dynamics and twisted codependence between a wealthy entrepreneur (James Fox) and his secretly ambitious manservant (Dirk Bogarde). “Those two men put each other through fucking hell,” said Max, and the brothers saw its symmetries to Bell's work.

However, there's a more personal connection to the drama. When the brothers read the book, they empathized with the theme of having to look after an ailing, dying relative, having recently tended to their own grandfather in his final years. Max said, “There was real excitement to us of exploring what it's like to take care of somebody, the madness of that, the surrealness of that.”

“Nobody knows what it's like to die until you're doing it,” Sam added. “It's a crazy experience, and there's this push and pull when you're living with someone that you love that's declining like that.”

Part of that emotional whiplash is expressed in The Front Room through narrative ambiguity, since Solange is great at playacting as a helpless old lady and only Belinda can see her tricks. “There's obviously manipulation in any family,” Max said, “especially when there's something intense you're going through. You see people as victims, but there were many times when we were taking care of our grandfather and we were shaking our heads, asking, ‘What are you doing?’”

So while there's a high Gothic/Southern Gothic edge to the story, the Eggers wants to start a conversation about the dirty realities of looking after an aging relative who is losing control of their bodily functions. Max said, “Culturally, we don't know how to deal with it, and there's no support system. It is wild to see a patriarch, in our case, or in this case a matriarch, become a baby. How does that happen? And someone has to clean it up. You wake up in the morning, and something smells, and you've got to deal with it.” Incontinence becomes a major plot point, one that they knew was central to the real-life experiences of caretakers, and Max complimented A24 for being “willing to challenge people and put that mirror up to them and say, ‘We've got to talk about this.’”

Many filmmakers might be worried about scaring potential cast members off with such a scatological text, but it was arguably one of the biggest selling points for Hunter. Sam explained, “She's very interested in talking about uncomfortable truths.”

Having seen her in The Tragedy of Macbeth, Max said that they knew she could handle "the physicality of the role, the tap-tap shuffle-shuffle of the canes. Being willing to do that, being able to do that, only Kathryn could do that.” But what made her perfect was “her facility for language. We wrote a character that was very specific, had a certain accent. ... We needed someone who could make you believe in Solange, and I think only she could have done it. Of course Susan wrote an incredible character, we were able to harness something with our personal experience, but it's Kathryn that made it iconic.”

If anything, it was Hunter who kept them closer to their planned themes. Sam recalled that early drafts of the script came back with notes that there was too much poop, and so some of it was cleaned out before it was green lit. “Kathryn approached us during rehearsals and looking at the script, and she went, ‘I remember there was more poop. Where is it?’”

That culminated in one key scene in which Solange soils her bed. Max said, “I remember her going, 'More, more, more!’”

“I can't imagine anyone else being willing to do that,” added Sam, “and we were so blessed that she got what we were trying to say. ... We would give her a storyboard of the moment and she would just do it, exactly what we imagined and more so.”

At the same time, the Wicked Stepmother needs her Cinderella, and Solange has Belinda. Max said, “Similar to Kathryn, Brandy was really willing to go through it and a lot of people were not. A lot of people were scared, and I think she'd admit she was scared too, but she wanted to stretch herself.”

Not that Belinda is a complete innocent. There's a level of hubris to her, and she's often portrayed as an unreliable narrator. Moreover, she doesn't take Solange in from the goodness of her heart, but because she's eying the old lady's estate. Sam said, “We wanted to make Belinda complex, and we wanted her to have some culpability.”

Not only did Norwood and Hunter both embrace the emotional and physical extremity of the scripts, but they quickly bonded in rehearsals, finding all the narrative and performance potential. So while their characters' conflict is dark and twisted, it's also often very, very funny. Belinda's constant infuriation at Solange's antics, which seemingly only she can see, evoke double acts like Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy ... and Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. “They had such chemistry,” said Max. “Our sound designer [Ric Schnupp] was like, ‘This is like Looney Tunes.’”

The Front Room is in theatres now. Find our review and showtimes here.