The Adams Household — Toby Poser, John Adams and daughters Lulu and Zelda — are like The Bee Gees of American indie horror. Scrappy, good and particularly resourceful, they’ve defied most expectations of what no-budget filmmaking can seem like. Mom of Flies, which gained the highest prize at Fantasia the place it premiered in summer season 2025, is maybe their most collaborative movie but; it’s written and directed by everybody besides Lulu (who nonetheless acts within the movie) and is intimately influenced by each John and Toby’s experiences with most cancers.
The movie is admirably made contemplating each the quick timeframe wherein it was shot (over the course of Zelda’s summer season break from college) and its close to lack of economic leeway. A lot of the household’s dances with dying bleed by the display in palpable methods, particularly when Mickey (Zelda) and father, Jake (John) have room to share their respective anxieties across the former’s lethal analysis. The movie’s creeping dread and emotional beats are robust, however it’s also frustratingly repetitious and energetically stagnant. That appears unusual, contemplating the household’s relationship to the fabric, however a lot of the movie is roofed by a thick layer of weird nonchalance.
Mom of Flies Is Creepy, However It Lacks Deep Sufficient Characterizations
Mickey is a school child who has lived with a cancerous tumor in her abdomen since she was fifteen, when she was instructed that she had a 50/50 likelihood of survival. She kicked the tumor then, but it surely has since grown again, and she or he has been instructed she might need six months earlier than her life involves a tragic finish.
Mickey looks like a tricky child with the type of smart disposition solely of us with unusual and unfair life experiences can achieve, but she additionally retains the newest information of her terminal sickness a secret from her associates in school. As she later tells her father, she is not scared about what dying could convey; as a substitute, she takes on a holistic understanding of the cycles of life, assuming that dying could convey her simply as a lot pleasure as life has. However she is not resigned to die, both. She’s going to hunt out the assistance of a mysterious dying witch deep within the Catskills.
Mickey is cagey about how she got here to listen to of Solveig (Poser), however Jake is, no less than initially (and admirably) eager to let his daughter dictate how she needs to go about dealing with what’s occurring to her physique in its ultimate days. It is refreshing to see an outline of parenting that’s this trusting, but it surely does appear unusual he’d ask zero questions till they arrive at Solveig’s secluded home.
Nonetheless, he is largely sport. They’re greeted by the choice healer, whose haunting however ethereal-looking abode is constructed across the base of a large tree trunk, a home that appears like a Frank Lloyd Wright fever dream. Solveig is odd and stilted, however not unkind or inhospitable. She has majestically lengthy black curls for hair and drapes herself in a darkish gray wrap. For no matter purpose, she is continually being swarmed by flies. She appears like a witch, in different phrases, which is kind of what she is, and although Jake is skeptical, he tries his greatest to associate with the method.
And it is a weird course of, one that’s shrouded in thriller even to Solveig’s affected person. It might be troublesome to summarize what she’s doing, since a lot of the time we simply see her closing her eyes and summoning… one thing, whereas murmuring below her breath. Once we can hear what she is saying, it’s by an incessant voiceover that appears like a cross between darkish arts prayer and poetry.
… it can be tiresome to observe a winsome witch suggestively contact issues and spout obscure incantations.
To make certain, there may be plenty of creepy imagery, and gnarly flashbacks of Solveig’s life earlier than her encounter with Mickey and Jake (together with an particularly nauseating delivery scene, for lack of a greater phrase), however plenty of it’s also too suggestive and never almost express sufficient. Positively, that enables us to sit down in an uncomfortable place whereby it is by no means fairly clear if that is somebody we should always belief or worry, but it surely can be tiresome to observe a winsome witch suggestively contact issues and spout obscure incantations.
Additionally tiresome: the infinite approach that Jake espouses his skepticism. For all of the member of the family’s intimate information of one another, it’s hanging how little we be taught of their wants and needs past the fundamentals of survival. Mickey has to continuously beg her father to cease being such a spoilsport to this dying doula enterprise, and in the long run so will we. One needs he would simply relent to the method or go away, however by the point Mickey makes that request recognized, we have already endured him being this fashion for a lot too lengthy.
The very best elements of Mom of Flies are within the margins. At its most lucid, it tells us that life, dying and therapeutic are magic — each of the Western and witchy varieties. The earth, with all of its pure processes proper below our noses, ought to by no means be scorned just because it is not novel. If something, the earth’s historical knowledge must be prized for every little thing it found out, centuries earlier than expertise did, lengthy earlier than we knew the right way to intervene. For the Adams, all of it’s particular. Being right here is particular. Even when the movie would not all the time talk that, its whispers are there, just like the flap of a fly’s wings.
Mom of Flies premieres completely on Shudder on January twenty third, 2026.
Mom of Flies
5/10
- Launch Date
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January 23, 2026
- Runtime
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92 minutes
- Director
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John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
- Writers
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John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
