By MICHAEL GINGOLD

Starring John Adams, Zelda Adams and Toby Poser
Written and directed by John Adams, Zelda Adams and Toby Poser
Shudder

If “write what you know” is a key truism for authors in all media, “use what you have” is the corollary for independent filmmakers. A fine exemplar of both is MOTHER OF FLIES, the new movie from The Adams Family. A world premiere at the current Fantasia International Film Festival, where it took the Cheval Noir Award for Best Film, it finds moviemakers/stars John Adams, Zelda Adams and Toby Poser drawing from traumatic personal experience for their narrative and turning their economy of means to their advantage. That’s been the case with most of their previous genre features (including HELLBENDER and WHERE THE DEVIL ROAMS), but MOTHER OF FLIES, set for a streaming debut on Shudder next year, is their most emotionally resonant and technically accomplished feature yet.

As the trio revealed during their highly emotional Q&A following the Fantasia screening, MOTHER OF FLIES was inspired by John and Poser’s past battles with cancer. Their prior films saw the trio united as a family unit on screen as well (along with daughter Lulu, who has a small role here as a motel clerk), so it’s a touch ironic that the titular “mother” played by Poser is an outsider to the central parent-child relationship. Solveig is a woman who dwells deep in the woods of upstate New York, where she is visited by college student Mickey (Zelda) and her father Jake (John). Mickey is afflicted with an unspecified cancer, and has learned­–just how is not immediately disclosed–that Solveig might be able to provide a cure that chemotherapy and other treatments have not.

An opening scene of a writhing, naked, blood-streaked Solveig signals that this trip isn’t destined for a happy ending, and there’s a pronounced sense of unease established early and developed inexorably throughout MOTHER OF FLIES. John and Zelda also served as cinematographers, and achieve a new level of visual craft with their imagery here. Nature is a fourth character in MOTHER OF FLIES: Solveig draws her occult power from it and the movie is suffused in it, with numerous shots observing the characters through trees and other vegetation, spiderwebs, etc. Solveig’s house can be seen as a secondary character as well, wrapped in branches like tentacles on the outside thanks to the digital compositing wizardry of VFX creator Trey Lindsay, and decorated and furnished on the inside with wood and bark and moss–another evocative example of the Adams Family’s skill with homegrown production design.

Nature has a heavy presence on the soundtrack too, as numerous scenes are “scored” with birdsong, the buzzing of insects, etc. It all combines to create a world where the familiar becomes corrupted and alien, and the promise of Mickey’s deliverance from disease gives way to other bodily deterioration as Jake and the audience look on helplessly. The eerie folk-horror atmosphere of MOTHER OF FLIES’ first half gives way to visceral, squishy grotesqueries in the second, and the Adamses aren’t shy about ladling on the blood and slime (and vomit and mucus in one particularly distressing scene).

At the same time, MOTHER OF FLIES makes room for numerous dramatic discussions about life and death, about coping and letting go–conversations that could perhaps only have been tailored by those who know whereof they speak–along with voiceovers and verse from Solveig regarding her practices and philosophies. Poser is truly beguiling as Solveig, while Zelda and John create an affecting bond between Mickey and Jake that becomes increasingly frayed as Solveig’s spells take hold. On top of all their other contributions, the family also scored the movie under their band name H6LLB6ND6R (which earned them another Fantasia award), and the hard-rock notes are judiciously used to elicit an emotional charge within the naturalistic audioscape. On every level, MOTHER OF FLIES evinces a high level of care and thought that the Adamses have put into the project, meshing personal pain with supernatural terror to conjure up something resonant and chilling.