(REVIEW) “The Front Room” tries to say something important about faith, but its social commentary is too silly to take seriously, and the thrills aren’t good enough to be silly fun.

It’s hard not to argue that we’re in a golden age of horror films. After movies like Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” and Ari Aster’s “Hereditary,” Hollywood horror has largely settled into the “scary monster that is actually a metaphor for important social/psychological issue.” That’s exactly the kind of horror I like. 

This way of doing horror films allows you to combine popular appeal with whatever message you want to communicate. And with every year giving us new gems like “Midsommar,” “Meagan,” “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” “Knock at the Cabin” and “Talk to Me,” it’s easy to see why people are jumping to make their own mark on the genre. Horror is also increasingly dealing with the changing face of religion in a post-Christian society. Exorcism movies most explicitly do this. 

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“The Front Room” uses the modern horror format to look at toxic Christian fundamentalism and present the return of pre-Christian paganism in a post-Christian culture as a return of the good guys. It’s an intriguing idea. Unfortunately, the film is not smart enough to pull it off, nor entertaining enough to be a dumb good time.

The film follows the pregnant Belinda (played by Brandy Norwood) and her partner Norman (Andrew Burnap), who are struggling financially. They agree to take in his estranged hyperreligious mother Solange (Kathryn Hunter), who’s promised to leave them everything in her extensive will if they do. But Belinda begins to believe that this was a terrible mistake.  

The movie has a solid setup and some deliciously campy performances. A psychological thriller that centers on the battle of wits between a new mom and her mother-in-law has a lot of potential to hit on relatable experiences and talk about wider issues, particularly when the new mom is a Black anthropologist who loves ancient goddess fertility statues and the mother-in-law is a racist Christian fundamentalist. Norwood and Hunter are fully committed to their roles, making you really feel like they believe what they’re saying and doing no matter how outrageous it gets.

Unfortunately, the movie never lives up to its entertaining premise or performances. The movie makes no sense, builds up to a payoff that never comes and, worst of all, does so all while acting like it’s giving you the most profound insights about society and religion that you’ve ever heard.

The first problem is that the couple doesn’t seem believable. They don’t behave so much like people, but aliens attempting to mimic human behavior after watching robot chicken parodies of Jordan Peele horror films. Normal people's responses to odd situations are jettisoned in favor of nonsensical ones with no explanation. One of them will say something completely insane; the other will act as if it’s normal. Or the other person will say something normal; the other will act like it’s insane. Why is this the first time Norman is mentioning his crazy religious upbringing? Why does Belinda insist that Solange has changed even though she’s acting insanely creepy from the start?

In an early scene, Belinda finds Solange on the floor in her room. The scene starts out with Belinda calling Solange from the hall and not getting a response. What would a normal human do? Call again, then if you don’t get an answer, knock. If you don’t get an answer, then you’d open the door. Then, if you see she’s on the floor, you run up to her and see if she’s OK. 

That’s not what happens. Instead, Belinda slowly opens the door without knocking. And when she sees Solange on the floor, she quietly tiptoes over to touch her, before being jumpscared by Solange. Now, obviously, tiptoeing over to something and getting jumpscared is a horror trope. Typically, that’s done where that would be a normal human reaction. Here, it makes no sense. And the movie is filled with such scenes. 

Plots about normal people who slowly uncover evil work better the more you establish their normalcy. If the protagonists seem normal and their situation normal, it’s easy to relate to the heroes as they explain away the creepy feeling they have until it continues to escalate and turns out to be something scary and evil. This draws a connection to the ordinary problems we face every day and the evil they represent. 

In the same way, the White family in “Get Out” just seems normal (and cringy) until it gets worse and worse, exposing racism’s ugliness. Or the odd town in “Stepford Wives” seems only odd and not deadly until later, exposing the patriarchy for what it is. The problem is, the “normal couple” in this film act so insane (and the mom is so overtly dark) from the very beginning that you can’t relate to any of it. 

The movie also never goes anywhere with its danger. Despite the fact that it has the mom portrayed as practically a witch from the start, she never really does anything with that. Sometimes it’s portrayed as if she has supernatural powers; sometimes she doesn’t. And that supernatural power never really amounts to anything, with any harm she does easily uncovered. Ultimately, she’s put in her place.  

Deconstruction of religion in “The Front Room” is also more cringy than scary, at times even funny. Fundamentalism has plenty of good potential for horror (see “Carrie”). But the film is so cartoonishly insistent on treating deeply ordinary and benign expressions of everyday religion as terrifyingly foreign that it’s hard to take seriously: quoting passages from the Bible about life after death. listening to worship music on the radio and crosses. 

All these things are treated with an ignorant Hollywood sensationalism usually reserved for made-up tribal religions in an “Indiana Jones” movie. Only those movies could expect that their audience and characters would be ignorant enough of its religions that it could treat them as horrific unknowns. However, most Americans have some familiarity with Christianity. Both Belinda and Andrew would have familiarity with it. 

Perhaps, if the movie treated those religious symbols as familiar but traumatic for the characters involved because of bad associations (like “The Exorcism” does with Catholicism), it could have worked.

It doesn’t.

It could also potentially work if they started out making it seem subtly creepy and built up to it feeling deeply scary. But it doesn’t. It starts out right away as being alien and horrifying. Even the more sensational Pentecostal elements (like speaking in tongues) are dialed so far up so immediately that it’s hard to take it seriously. 

But it’s where the movie actually does try to get serious about religion that it becomes its most absurd. In several heated conversations between Belinda and Solange, the two argue about Christianity. Belinda accuses Christians and Christianity of upholding colonialism and white supremacy. When Solange shows Belinda her Christian fish, she tells Belinda about how Christians made this symbol to communicate while they were being persecuted — just like she’s being persecuted today. 

Belinda corrects her. “No, they stole it,” she says, explaining how the fish symbol was originally a pagan fertility myth before Christians co-opted it. 

And here we find the true religious angle of “The Front Room.” The film attempts to frame pre-Christian paganism as the true persecuted minority, with Christianity as a White oppressor religion. We used to live in a world where women were valued — as we can see through all the fertility goddess status — but then the movie tells us that Christianity “stole” our symbols and oppressed us. 

This is a dumb framing of history. Yes, the fish symbol was widely in use at the time Christians used it to symbolize Christianity. That’s why it was an effective symbol for hiding. Saying people who used a symbol everyone was using to literally hide so they wouldn’t die (at the hands of the very pagans you’re lionizing), then calling it “stealing” is a very liberal use of the word.

Portraying Christianity writ large as a White oppressor group and calling the pagan people they replaced as not oppressive is a fantasy. Christianity is a global multi-ethnic religion that existed long before Western colonialism and long after. And as far as who the greater oppressor is, as Nancy Pearcey pointed out in “The Toxic War on Masculinity,” one of the most consistent findings around the world is that wherever Christianity goes, women are elevated above the status they had in the pagan societies they lived in. This is true for women but also everyone else. Historian Tom Holland goes so far in his book “Dominion” as to say that most of the values we have for compassion today come from Christianity.

But the filmmakers really want to frame the struggle between Belinda and Solange as a part of a cosmic struggle between a fantasy feminist version of paganism that rarely, if ever, existed and a small part of Christianity that they dislike. 

Journalist Louise Perry, who understands how Christianity created the human dignity for women and the marginalized that became accepted in our society, noted in her article for First Things that as a culture we are not becoming secular but “repaganizing.”

Paganism is simply enchanting and giving glory to creation itself – such as female fertility or an old bearded man — rather than a transcendent God who still loves us. But this is why, as we stop being Christian, we’re not becoming atheists but pagans.  

Perry suggests the following: “What if … we understand the Christian era as a clearing in a forest? The forest is paganism: Dark, wild, vigorous and menacing, but also magical in its way. For 2,000 years, Christians pushed the forest back, with burning and hacking, but also with pruning and cultivating, creating a garden in the clearing with a view upward to heaven. But watch as roots outstretch themselves and new shoots spring up from the ground. The patch of sky recedes.” 

This change in horror films is reflected vividly by comparing the imagery in “The Front Room” to “The Exorcist.” In "The Exorcist," the devil comes through a pagan idol and can only be driven out by the cross. In ‘The Front Room,” evil is brought in by the cross and, when it's driven out, replaced by pagan idols.

But as the forest of paganism returns, it needs a new refounding myth to explain its absence and justify its return. It must frame its historical defeat at the hands of Christianity as the result of theft and oppression, and its return is one of heightened elevation of human dignity.  

In many ways, this reminds me of a secular pagan version of the “God’s Not Dead” franchise. The “God’s Not Dead” movies are an infamous movie series about Christians fighting atheists who are discriminating against Christians because they hate God. While they hit on some real themes about how Christians sometimes have been — and increasingly are — discriminated against in an increasingly post-Christian society, they so exaggerate and distort it from the reality that it becomes unrecognizable, making the enemies far too much like demons than what they actually are.  

They make the atheists scary and evil, rather than just wrong, to justify how Christians could have allowed themselves to be so marginalized – and justify vanquishing them rather than talking with them or converting them.

At the end of “The Front Room,” we see that this narrative had taken hold for Belinda, too. Although Solange has very little power and there are plenty of ways that she can be dealt with, Belinda decides to take matters into her own hands in the most drastic way possible — and feels no guilt about it whatsoever. It’s something that the movie feels like it wants us to applaud.  

In a post-Christian society, it’s inevitable that movies will increasingly find creative ways to reflect and wrestle with this religious change. Hopefully, more of them will do so in a more intelligent (or at least entertaining) way than “The Front Room.”  

Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.