Horrorfest 2025: The Front Room

The Front Room
Written and directed by Max and Sam Eggers
Based on the short story by Susan Hill
Starring Brandy, Andrew Burnap, Neal Huff and Kathryn Hunter
USA, 2024

Brandy returns to horror in THE FRONT ROOM, a tale of an interracial couple who find themselves taking care of the husband’s ailing stepmother, who turns out to be a racist. And also might be a witch or something. Who knows? This movie doesn’t. Neither do I.

The trailers sold this thing as a GET OUT-like examination of how racism manifests itself in society, both as a festering wound in the past and a legacy to live with. The movie itself touches on the racism a little bit but it's more concerned with how annoying it is to have to take care of an old person.

To be fair: there are more than enough obvious moments in this movie to show that the elderly stepmother is, indeed, deliberately fucking with Brandy’s character, who is a new mother who recently quit her academic job because they were treating her like shit. The stepmother (Kathryn Hunter) is clearly manipulative and abusive. But, this stuff is complicated by money. She offers the couple all her inheritance. Having been absued by herself in the past, her stepson (Neal Huff) wants nothing to do with her and refuses. It’s Brandy who argues they should take her in, cuz they need money.

So, turns out, they should not have taken her in.

While it is undeniably true that it is very hard work, both physically and emotionally, to take care of people, especially loved ones, and especially people who are difficult on a good day, it is also difficult to sympathize with Brandy and the things she ends up doing when some other solution could have easily been reached. If it’s supposed to be about a descent into madness on Brandy’s part, it didn’t go far enough. But, I don’t think it’s really supposed to be about that. So instead it went too far, I guess.

Still, I’d be remiss if I did not mention Kathryn Hunter is amazing in this flick and deserves all the awards she will never get for it.