Review: ‘The Voices of Our Mother’ moans in pain

Filmmaker Mark O’Brien has a way of crafting his work with a powerfully unsettling exposure to the darkest parts of human nature. His feature film debut, 2021’s The Righteous, peeled back the layers of religious penitence in sharp, blinding ways. With his second outing, the equally probing The Voices of Our Mother, the writer/director leaves no stone unturned. Themes of generational inheritances, shared trauma, and learning forgiveness twist like vines up an unsettling trellis of visceral anguish rooted in repetitive cycles of abuse and an unwillingness to confront dangerous behaviors head-on.

William (O’Brien), Annika (Georgina Reilly), Therese (Carolina Bartczak), and Martin (Alex Ozerov-Meyer) gather together when it becomes clear that their mother Harriet (Sheila McCarthy) needs proper care. She can’t possibly live alone anymore. But her children still harbor unresolved resentment toward her for things from their childhoods. While they collectively concede that Harriet does need to be looked after, no one wants to carry that burden themselves. The trauma they’ve long buried behind walls of career obsession, piousness, or drug addiction needs to be excavated and dragged out into the sunlight. It won’t handle itself.

But there also might be something supernatural at play. Their mother doesn’t act as she should. Her erratic behavior hints that a more sinister force could have taken hold in her soul. As Harriet grows more psychotic, McCarthy digs her heels deeper into the material in truly astounding ways. The group must forgive in order to not only save their mother but themselves, as well. O’Brien threads together psychological wounds that torment the afflicted for generations, and it’s only through something so relentlessly brutal that the characters come together before falling apart.

The Voices of Our Mother feels like the spiritual successor to 2014’s The Taking of Deborah Logan in both thematic underpinnings and tone. Where the latter mines the deterioration of dementia and its lasting impact, the former serves as a psycho-drama about the weight of childhood abuse, the diverse ways of coping, and figuring out how to let go. Aside from McCarthy, the ensemble scrapes the bones of raw human emotion and delivers standout performances that breathe life into the script. Much like The Righteous, The Voices of Our Mother burns slow, methodically unraveling complicated familial relationships until there’s nothing underneath.

Mark O’Brien makes effective use of a limited budget. The Voices of Our Mother feels intimate and inescapable. The walls increasingly push in around the viewer, making it tense, claustrophobic, and airless. You’d need a butcher’s knife to cut through the dread hanging between the characters. Horrors abound from all corners of the screen, but the real fear blossoms from the most cavernous reaches of the mind. It’s a character study in human futility, shame, desperation, and what faith really looks like.

The Voices of Our Mother hits Shudder this Friday (June 19).