The term “A24 horror” refers to such a wide range of the distributor’s festival acquisitions and in-house productions that it doesn’t accomplish much of anything as a genre distinction.  The only thing you can be sure about with an A24 Horror movie, really, is that its marketing will be effective but misleading.  Whatever quibbles you might have with the brand’s reputation as a taste signifier among the Letterboxd userbase, you have to at least appreciate its ability to always tell the exact right lie to get wide audiences in the door to watch movies with limited commercial appeal.  At the start of the A24 Horror trend, that meant selling Robert Eggers’s calling-card debut feature The Witch as a scare-filled haunted hayride instead of what it actually is: a Häxan-style illustration of spooky academic research.  A decade later, it means selling Eggers’s brothers Max & Sam’s debut The Front Room as a Get Out-style “social thriller” instead of what it actually is: a post-Farrelly Brothers toilet-humor comedy.  Usually, that misleading marketing only upsets The Fans, who show up to movies like The Witch expecting jump scares and are annoyed that they’re instead prompted to think and interpret.  This time, the marketing has seemingly upset The Critics, who have complained that The Front Room is more silly than it is scary, as if that wasn’t exactly its intent.  I’d even go as far as to argue that The Front Room plays like a deliberate self-parody of the A24 Horror brand, like a Scary Movie update for the Elevated Horror era . . . but there just isn’t enough connective tissue between those modern metaphor-first-scares-second horrors for a genre spoof to land with any specifics or coherence.

To be fair to the naysayers, The Front Room‘s tonal misdirection extends beyond its extratextual marketing.  For its opening 15 minutes, the film goes through the motions of pretending to be a middling post-Get Out horror about racist microaggressions, starring 90s popstar Brandy Norwood as a college professor whose career is stalled by her white colleagues.  Then, the movie reveals its true colors as a Southern-friend psychobiddy gross-out comedy when it introduces its racist macroaggressions in the form of actress Kathryn Hunter.  A in-tongues-speaking Evangelical Daughter of the Confederacy, Hunter is perfectly calibrated as the loud-mouthed comic foil to Brandy’s quietly dignified academic.  The two women play emotional Tug of War for dominance over their shared home while Brandy’s hilariously ineffectual husband (Andrew Burnap) cowards from all responsibility to stand up to his demanding, demonic stepmother on his wife’s behalf.  Like in most familial, generational battles, Hunter weaponizes her inherited wealth to shame her stepson and his wife into walking on eggshells around her while she gets to do & say whatever she wants, no matter how vile.  When Brandy refuses to politely play along, Hunter weaponizes her own bodily fluids instead, smearing the house with piss, shit, and bile until she gets her way.  This battle of wills is, of course, complicated by the birth of Brandy’s newborn baby, so that the stakes of who emerges from their flame war as the home’s true matriarch are about as high as they can get (and should be familiar to anyone who’s had a pushy parental figure tell them what to do with their own bodies & family planning).

The Front Room is very funny, very gross, and very, very misleading.  I can see how critics might dismiss the film as a rote A24 Horror update to Rosemary’s Baby if they only stayed engaged for its opening few minutes, but as soon as Kathryn Hunter enters the frame it quickly evolves into an entirely different kind of beast.  The way Hunter thuds around on her two wooden walking canes and intones all of her racist tirades in an evil Tree Trunks lilt is obviously comedic in intent.  She might start her attacks on Brandy’s personal dignity with realistically offensive terminology like “you people” & “uppity”, but she comically escalates those attacks whenever called out by whining “I’m a racist baby! Goo goo, ga ga, wah wah!”.   I laughed.  I also laughed every time she yelled “I’m an M-E-Double-S mess!” while spreading her bodily filth all over Brandy’s house & possessions, but I understand that potty humor is an acquired taste.  What I don’t understand is how audiences have been so stubbornly determined to take this movie seriously despite that outrageously exaggerated performance.  It’s like studying Foghorn Leghorn speeches for sound parental advice and legal standing; of course you’re going to find them lacking.  The racial tension in its central dynamic is genuinely tense, but it seeks its cathartic release in laughter, not scares.  A lot more people would be having a lot more fun with it if they thought of it more as John Waters doing Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? than Jordan Peele doing Rosemary’s Baby, despite what the tone of the marketing (and the first act) leads you to expect.

-Brandon Ledet