There’s something immediately distinctive about the films of the Adams family. The mythology of this moviemaking clan is well known in horror circles, how they turned their backyard movies into a cottage industry.
Their breakout success, The Deeper You Dig, introduced audiences to the feel of their films: family-based horror with a corpse pallor, damp and fetid, primordial and merciless, with dark forces oozing around the edges of reality. Their strongest films come when they cleave to that queasy aesthetic, as in carnival gothic daydream Where the Devil Roams.
Mother of Flies, their fifth horror film as a family production company, doesn’t simply build upon that signature style, but also finally reveals their greatest hidden strength: the editing of John Adams. The quiet grisliness is still there, the soft intimacy of having the family be their own cast, the captivating ugliness of their world of woods and rot – and of course the exceptional goth-punk soundtrack from the family band, H6llb6nd6r. But Mother of Flies has a hypnotic quality never quite present in their prior films, a sensation like falling, and much of it is created by John’s transitions and juxtapositions.
After all, this is not really one story but two, balanced and interwoven. Or maybe not so much interwoven as one wrapped around the other, like ivy throttling a tree. But college student Mickey (Zelda Adams) knows about being close to death. Her cancer has come roaring back and with conventional medicine out of options she convinces her father, Jake (John Adams) to take her to a natural healer. Well, witch, really. Solveig (Toby Poser) lives in a Babba Yagga house deep in the forest with a giant funeral cairn in front and promises that she can heal Mickey in three days. The cure will be ugly and agonizing, and Jake must bear witness as Mickey endures that agony, which is one half of the story. The other half is Solveig’s, recounted over memories through a narration that is half-spoken, half-chanted, an incantation intended to bring her to her reward for this seemingly beneficial act. Someone must pay a cost, and it seems that the purse string is being drawn around Mickey’s neck.
After the larger scale productions of Where the Devil Roams and their first international production, Hellhole. Mother of Flies could almost seem like a retreat in scale, back to the days of basically just John, Toby, and Zelda doing everything, with a cameo from sister Lulu and visual effects from Trey Lindsay, whose distinctive visions of mud and blood are an inherent and necessary ingredient of the Adams’ spellcasting. But the smaller scale isn’t a reduction so much as a compression. Their recent films have been landscapes, and this is too, but in miniature. As big as the woods are, there’s a claustrophobia to every scene, made more unnerving by a certain ambiguity about Solveig. There’s a powerful but understated scene in which Mickey fears about the pain of the healing process, and Solveig asked whether chemo was any worse. It’s a tiny barb meant to hook her in, and somehow reminiscent of Danny the dealer asking Withnail why he trusts one drug over another. Even with Solveig explaining herself through her autobiographical narration, her true intent remains deviously hidden until the closing moments.
That mood created by the whole family, but especially the edit, is the vertigo of hope and terror combined. That they take such dark material and still make the audience wonder whether Mickey will fall or fly makes Mother of Flies a movie that will truly crawl under your skin.
Mother of Flies
World Premiere
Monday, Sept. 22, 2:30pm
Fantastic Fest 2025 runs Sept. 18-25, Passes and info at fantasticfest.com.
Find all our news, reviews, and interviews at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.
