MOTHER, MAY I? – It’s like when someone does an impression so they can tell a gag, only they’re still in character well after the joke’s over, and it’s amusing at first, then a bit irritating, and then it just gets weird, and you walk away. In ‘Mother, May I?’, Emmett (Kyle Gallner) inherits a house from his recently deceased and somewhat acrimoniously estranged mother. He goes there with his girlfriend and starts to sort through (or avoid) his issues with the past, but because it’s all pressuring the relationship, his other half decides she wants to try out some therapy on him. For reasons that become clear later in the film, she’s a bit of an amateur psychoanalyst and believes that plying him with shrooms and deep conversations will unclog his pipes. When it doesn’t, she hits on the idea of pretending to be his dead mother – yep, if you’re thinking that’s kind of bad form, so am I. But she does this weird ‘transference’ type thing, and after a while, when she steadfastly refuses to step out of role, the whole thing gets quite murky – is something supernatural going on, perhaps a possession, or is Emmett being supremely gaslit to nefarious ends? ‘Mother, May I?’ is a classic case of ‘how best to read?’. It plays with mind-gamey thriller tropes whilst shading into spectral gloom; the aesthetics certainly belong to low-key horror of an atmospheric hue, but the thrust is more like an unhinged relationships drama. I wasn’t necessarily awed by the call of the weird, but despite the slightly alienating self-regard displayed by these preening neurotic hipsters, I genuinely wanted to know if and how they were going to figure it all out, and there was suspense in getting there. A nice slow simmer with a high creep factor and recommended if you like films about two tense weirdoes in a house.
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