‘You Are Not My Mother’ Review: Parental Misguidance

A baby in a stroller sits alone on a deserted nighttime street. A young mother sprawls on a bed, limbs bound and head shrouded. A teenage girl cowers before classmates who are threatening to set her on fire.

These are only a few of the chilling images in Kate Dolan’s arresting debut feature, “You Are Not My Mother,” a skin-crawling merger of Irish folklore and family secrets. At once deeply metaphorical and genuinely distressing, the film hovers anxiously around Char (Hazel Doupe), a withdrawn and bullied teenager who’s becoming increasingly alarmed by the erratic behavior of her mother, Angela (Carolyn Bracken). When Angela disappears, only to reappear the following day without explanation, the mystery of her whereabouts is only deepened by the unfazed reaction of Char’s grandmother (Ingrid Craigie). In this household, the silences scream.

Set just outside Dublin during the run-up to Halloween, “You Are Not My Mother” leaves much of its supernatural thrust to vagueness and allusion, focusing instead on Char’s responses to her mother’s terrifying transformation. Pale-faced and wide-eyed, Doupe is heartbreaking; but it’s Bracken who has the more challenging role, flitting from hostile to loving, severe to vulnerable, energized to near-catatonic. In one startling scene, performed to Joe Dolan’s toe-tapper “You’re Such a Good Looking Woman,” she slowly turns a simple dance into a petrifying act of predation.

Imaginative and spooky, “You Are Not My Mother” shows just how frightening — and stigmatizing — a parent’s mental illness can be to a child. Trapped in her suffocating suburb, where steel-colored skies press down on crouching rooftops (the wonderfully moody cinematography is by Narayan Van Maele), Char is alone. If she should find a champion, it won’t be from inside her house.

You Are Not My Mother
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.