Written and directed by Mark O’Brien, when a family matriarch falls seriously ill, relatives gather and discover their shared ancestral ties bind them in unexpected ways. Starring: Sheila McCarthy, Georgina Reilly, Mark O’Brien, Carolina Bartczak, Alex Ozerov-Meyer, Anna Ferguson and Shawn Doyle.
Having Sheila McCarthy playing a woman possessed is a fantastic idea, she’s completely built for that kind of dark, unhinged, sharp-tongued performance, but sadly this was not the right film to make the most of that. She still does her part and she’s one of the things that will likely keep you watching The Voices of Our Mother, but ultimately, it feels like it’s never truly about her character or her illness. It also never really feels like it knows what it does want to be about.
That’s the key issue, it’s spreading itself between the family drama, possession, religion and abuse, and it spreads itself overly thin. The link between each element of the story is weak, the progression is problematic to hold viewers’ attention, and it spends far too much time simply having the family incessantly arguing with one another. The ironic thing is that if it actually took the time to delve into the history behind those arguments, that would be more interesting. Instead, the rather dark family history is dropped in casually and underdeveloped.
When the story isn’t holding up its end, that leaves the visual to try and step it up and give the audience enough to at least get a satisfying experience but again, sadly it’s just not the case. Mark O’Brien’s style is heavy-handed; there’s an over-reliance on middling effects and the attempts at jump scares are transparent. One of the key choices that undermines The Voices of Our Mother on the whole is how it cheaply tries to use the sound to add in scares. There’s a tendency to purely jack up the volume when they want to imply a scene is scary, bombarding viewers with noise and it becomes rather frustrating.
The Voices of Our Mother is unfortunately dealing with an identity crisis which throws off the whole experience. It feels like Mark O’Brien wanted this to be so many different kinds of horror, to the point that he never landed on any of them and unsuccessfully tried to be all of them. The way that the story plays out makes it seem like had they expanded the dark family history and violence, this could have been an interesting thriller but as a horror, it falls short. It’s a shame because the performances are good, and Sheila McCarthy genuinely could have made this into something iconic, given better material. Unfortunately, as it stands this is just a rather forgettable outing.
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