I Have Notes: The Front Room (2024)
You're never prepared for weaponized incontinence
I should’ve known something was up when I saw that The Front Room’s run time was only one hour and 34 minutes. In an era where movies are clocking in at three hours and change1, a 90-minute feature portends a film that doesn’t have much there there.
I had decent hopes for The Front Room, a 2024 A24 film written and directed by Max and Sam Eggers starring Brandy Norwood. *Old lady voice* In my day, I went to the picture show to see Brandy cut her scary movie teeth in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)2, so I was excited to see Moesha in another horror movie. And the premise of The Front Room had promise: A mixed-race married couple with strained finances and a baby on the way takes in the husband’s racist, religiously zealous stepmother on the promise of her inheritance when she finally kicks it.
But after 94 minutes, I needed a do-over for Brandy — and myself.
The Front Room has a lot of good ingredients: Southern gothic elements, Christianity used as a shield for abuse, racial tension within a family. But this jumble of a movie needed longer to stew in order to bring out the nuance of its parts. The characters and their relationships to one another are too shallow to make me truly invested in anyone’s outcome. Moments that were supposed to shock the audience made me guffaw. And the directors don’t give enough space to develop the racial tensions of a Black woman caring for an actual Daughter of the Confederacy and her white husband’s role in allowing this to happen. The Front Room is a warmed-over Rosemary’s Baby that calls too often upon body horror to illustrate psychological terror.
Belinda (Brandy) and Norman (Andrew Burnap) seem like a perfectly nice couple who are in over their heads with a new baby due at any moment. The movie tells us that these two are good, smart people: Belinda is an anthropology professor who teaches about the role of the goddess throughout cultural history, and Norman is a public defender. After a shared tragedy, they’ve grown more protective of their growing family. And the financial strain of choosing their benevolent professions (and in Belinda’s case, quitting her job after the dean repeatedly screws her over) is supposed to set the stage for the central couple to take in Norman’s estranged, abusive, wealthy stepmother, Solange,3 who requests to live with them after Norman’s father dies.
The directors don’t give enough space to Belinda and Norman as a couple and as individuals to make me believe any of the setup. They’ve been married for a decent chunk of time, yet Norman hasn’t told Belinda much about the bigot who raised/tortured him until they have to go to his father’s funeral in the first act. And there’s not enough passion4, love and understanding between the two to make me believe that Belinda would tolerate Solange’s manipulative presence in the house, no matter how dire their finances5 (more on that in a bit). And the movie wants us to believe that Solange’s entrance is the first time the couple has ever confronted a person who is uncomfortable with their interracial marriage. It seems like Norman and Belinda have never had a conversation on how others may view their relationship or the implications of raising Black children in the United States, which is a huge miss for a modern movie.
It’s clear from jump that Solange wants control over Norman, Belinda and the baby. Solange comes out the gate calling her daughter-in-law “Belin-der,” which, in Hunter’s creepy Southern accent, sounds extra antebellum. She stomps on any boundaries Norman and Belinda try to establish, from the room they want to give her (she wants the baby’s room) to insisting on prayers before dinner (something the couple doesn’t do) to coming up with a new name for the baby.6 And Solange makes sure to remind Belinda that she thinks less of her because she’s Black in a dinner conversation that quickly devolves from micro-aggressions into an all-out tantrum. But it’s never clear why Solange wants to undercut Belinda and take over her new household. That woman is one bag of Hot Cheetos away from meeting her maker; what does she care about “mothering” the stepson she abused?
Then, the situation escalates quickly as Solange… well, I can’t think of any other way to say this… weaponizes her incontinence. This leaves Belinda changing the diapers for both her newborn and her stepmother-in-law as her husband heads off to work. The filmmakers succeed in showing us the ugly parts of caring for an elderly adult, but they don’t know when to leave well enough alone. At a certain point, I had to wonder what Belinda and Norman were even feeding Solange — the amount of excrement she leaves seems impossible for the human body to expel in such a short amount of time. There’s even a MONTAGE with shot upon shot of the couple dragging Solange to the bathroom, flushing toilets, and Solange hollering that she’s “made a M-E-S-S MESS.”
Kathryn Hunter inhibits Solange like it’s the first of the month and the rent is due. The actress leans heavy on physicality: She stoops over and always seems one slippery spot away from collapse. She supports her small frame with not one, but TWO canes, which creates eerie footsteps (cane steps?) that still ring in my ears. Hunter’s face easily transitions from sinful delight to dread as Solange begins to manipulate her stepson into thinking that Belinda is the real enemy in the house. And there was something about Solange’s ever-so-slightly askew wig that perfectly topped off this character, an old bitty who’s a sanctified pain in the ass. I can’t tell if Hunter’s performance is intentional or accidental camp — there were moments that made me holler in amusement at the actress’s choices.
Hunter’s portrayal of Solange sits in sharp contrast to the material Brandy has to work with as Belinda. The Brothers Eggers, who wrote the movie based on a short story of the same name by Susan Hill, fail to write Belinda with enough depth for the audience to believe that she would put up with Solange’s degradation.7 This points to my main issue with The Front Room — Belinda is a character who happens to be Black, not a Black character. She enters the all-white space of her father-in-law’s funeral without hesitation, despite the warning from her husband of how Solange might be opposed to their marriage. She finds Solange’s Daughter of the Confederacy certificate, but it takes her white husband to finally rip it up. And as that scatological montage shows us, Belinda is bathing and changing the diapers of a woman who most likely doesn’t consider her daughter-in-law as fully human. Yes, Belinda tells her husband she needs help caring for Solange, but Norman can’t (or wont’t) provide her with relief, leaving her to deal with HIS stepmother’s growing duplicity and abuse. And the Brothers Eggers want me to accept that a Black woman would go along with this shenanigans? And I don’t for one second believe that Belinda, a high-achieving Black woman worked her way to a position as an anthropology professor, wouldn’t have a community of Black homegirls, mentors, aunties, cousins and work friends who would at MINIMUM check in on Belinda and the baby.8
It’s one thing to have a film led by a Black character. It’s another to build a Black character fully realized enough to acknowledge the role that race plays in this very specific situation.9 The script turns Belinda into a mostly passive caretaker, which flattens a character that could have provided the dynamic perspective this movie needed. Without giving too much away, Belinda perseveres. But at what cost?
In a lot of ways, I was glad that The Front Room had such a short runtime. It was like undertaking a work task you’ve been putting off for weeks, and it only takes a few minutes to complete. Yet the movie would’ve benefited from more time spent on character development and less on excrement.
Looking at you, The Brutalist.
RIP, Dixie Dozen movie theater. Like so many businesses I’ve seen come and go on Dixie Highway in Louisville, I’ll aways remember you (even though the space is now a Hobby Lobby).
“Knowles?!” I shouted out loud in my living room when a character says her name.
And a brief sex scene does not do enough figurative heavy lifting for me.
One way they show that the couple is on the struggle bus is that Belinda drives an old Prius, which appears to be the same model as my Prius. OFFENSE!
The gasp I gusped when Belinda and Norman went along with naming their baby girl Laurie after his father, who, let’s not lie, was probably as racist as Solange.
Even their financial problems aren’t enough to make Belinda a slave to Solange. SELL THAT MOTHERTUCKING HOUSE IF MONEY’S TIGHT, DANG.
We learn that both of her parents are dead, which the Brothers Eggers use as shorthand for Belinda moving through life alone.
I can imagine a naysayer hollering about, “Why’s it always gotta be about race?” Because it’s ALWAYS about race, homie.