Crew
Directors/Screenplay – John Adams, Zelda Adams & Toby Poser, Producer – Toby Poser, Photography – John Adams & Zelda Adams, Music – H6llb6nd6r, Visual Effects/Digital Makeup – Trey Lindsay, Practical & Makeup Effects – John Adams & Toby Poser, Prosthetics – James Bell. Production Company – Wonder Wheel Productions.
Cast
Zelda Adams (Mickey), Toby Poser (Solveig), John Adams (Jake), Lulu Adams (Ruthie at Reception), Trey Lindsay (Oncologist)
Plot
The teenage Mickey is suffering from a cancer and has a fatal diagnosis. She persuades her father Jake to drive into the woods to see the healer Solveig. They arrive and are invited to stay Solveig’s home in the woods for three days, where they are supposed to sleep in beds of moss and branches. Jake has difficulty getting into Solveig’s unusual pronouncements, but Mickey persists with what Solveig asks in the hope of finding a cure.
The Adams Family consist of husband John Adams, wife Toby Poser and their daughters Lulu and Zelda who between them direct, write, produce, photograph, create the music for and star in their own films. They started out making Rumblestrips (2013), Knuckle Jack (2014), The Shoot (2014) and Halfway to Zen (2016), all of which are non-genre dramas.
By the end of the 2010s, the Adams’s discovered the horror genre and into the 2020s have made a unique and impressive body of films with The Deeper You Dig (2019), Hellbender (2021), Where the Devil Roams (2023) and Hell Hole (2024). It has been an incredibly interesting journey watching the Adams Family flex their muscles in the horror genre with increasing strength. They are in search of a very dark and individualistic vision of American Folk Horror. In this regard, Mother of Flies ventures into the darkest places they have travelled to date.
One of the greatest aspects of the Adams Family’s films is their sense of visual design and ability to capture striking images. The house in the woods is a unique marvel that comes with a two-level structure as though it is built into a tree with roots that emerge beneath and the eaves overrun with moss, almost as if it has become part of the forest. The interior where John and Zelda are given beds with mattresses of moss or that are angular arrangements of tree branches looks out of this world. The world of the woods is beautifully photographed with cuts away to the wildlife of the area – alive with autumnal colours, snakes lurking under rocks, small insects crawling along branches and leaves, the shapes of faces embedded inside tree trunks.
Toby Poser gives a stern and serenely aloof performance as the witch, serving up dinners of uncooked leaf and raw plant, even providing John with quite possibly poisonous teas made of hemlock. Her dialogue is all grave seriousness and cryptic portents. One of the more striking scenes is when they sit down to dinner and Toby asks them to pray, where John adds an “amen” without even thinking about it and she demands he take it back by spitting on the floor – if there is any sense that we have left behind all that is familiar and stepped over into something else, that is surely it.
There is quite a bit of padding with Toby’s slow, somnolent voiceover – which makes a lot more sense when the ending is understood. And then there is the big twist that turns a good deal everything we have seen happening in the woods on its head. It does feel a somewhat gimmicky twist, but I was sufficiently into Mother of Flies that I was happy to go with it.
Trailer here