‘The Front Room’ Review: A Force Too Malevolent for This Movie

The first time that Kathryn Hunter appears in the ho-hum horror movie “The Front Room,” her head is forebodingly obscured by a veil. She’s at the funeral of her husband, who, you suspect, probably left this mortal coil unwillingly. It’s too bad that he couldn’t stick around longer because if he had, the poor guy would have been able to watch Hunter — as a flamboyantly malicious force named Solange — rapidly get her weird on, inching into the shadows like a malevolent spider while weaving a progressively stickier, ickier web.

Hunter greatly enlivens “The Front Room,” so it’s too bad she is mostly relegated to supporting duties in this tale. Its featured attraction is Belinda (Brandy Norwood), an anthropology professor who quits in a fit of pique shortly after the story opens. She has her reasons, more or less; she feels understandably aggrieved and undervalued at work, but given that she’s pregnant, and that she and her husband, Norman (Andrew Burnap), need the money, it’s clear common sense isn’t her strong suit. This first impression deepens into an irksome trait when she and Norman learn that Solange — his stepmother — will help them out if she can move in with them. Since they’re cash-hungry, they agree; woo-woo trouble ensues.

The writer-director twin brothers Sam and Max Eggers, making their feature directorial debut, have a grasp of the genre’s fundamentals: They know how to stage an unwelcoming house, and how to play with light and shadow. But either they don’t know or don’t care how easy is it for viewers to lose interest in characters who, like Belinda and Norman, consistently make wrong choices. It brings out the sadist in you (or maybe it’s just me), especially when those wrong choices are so obviously a matter of narrative contrivance and weak character development. (“The Front Room” is loosely based on a short story of the same title by Susan Hill about a couple who, inspired by a sermon, charitably take in a widowed relative.)