‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’ Proves To Be A Powerful Muslim Film
(REVIEW) There aren’t a lot of American-made faith-based films focusing on Muslims. This isn’t a surprise, as Muslims make up barely more than 1% of the American population. Despite this, Muslims loom large in the American imagination and public life. Islamic terrorists have been regularly portrayed as villains in Hollywood films since 9/11. And Muslims have been elected to a record number of public offices in the past year, with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani being the most famous example.
It’s just one reason the new Mahershala Ali action drama “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” is such a remarkable movie. The film is not only one of the best movies with a Muslim protagonist I’ve seen, but one of the best faith-based films, period.
The film follows a devoutly Muslim hitman named Latif (Mahershala Ali), who struggles to balance work, faith and fatherhood. When his wife dies, he embarks on a desperate journey across Houston to protect his children as he confronts the forces closing in around him. The “forces” are a gang war between his Muslim hitman buddies, who don’t want him to give up his lifestyle, and a radical group of Christian vigilantes (led by John Cho) killing anyone who gets in the way of their crusade against traffickers.
READ: ‘Daniel And The Fiery Furnace’ Proves Faith-Based Movies Need More Than Good Intentions
What makes “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” so impressive is that it combines so many things that are hard to find in faith-focused movies. Hollywood films have long struggled to make movies about faith that resonate with the experiences of actually religious people.
Religious people have historically struggled to make faith movies that aren’t preachy, are artistically impressive, appeal to men or cross over into action genres or anything beyond Hallmark-style inspirational films. That makes a movie about a religious man who balances fatherhood, faith and fighting a gang war the kind of thing you almost never see — and even more rarely see done so well.
The first impressive thing is the mashup of genres. The setup of the film seamlessly blends the common tropes and themes of a faith-based film with a John Wick-esque hitman action film. Latif is struggling with his faith in God and how to raise his kids himself after the death of his wife. A character struggling with their faith after a death is a common faith-based setup. But the dead wife is also a common action-hero setup. Latif’s family functions as the faith-based genre’s broken relationships that can only be reconciled when he reconciles with God (“I Can Only Imagine,” “Last Rodeo”). And they function in the action genre as the sympathetic motive that justifies the hero’s violence (“Taken,” “Nobody”).
Another thing “Your Mother” does so much better than most Hollywood or faith-based industry films is deftly balancing both the communal-religious and individualized-spiritual parts of faith. Latif regularly goes to his mosque and prays, goes through the five daily prayers and gives his kids moral precepts, such as the definition of “jihad” as an internal moral struggle.
This is typically how Hollywood is most adept at representing faith in film: by visualizing the rituals and imagery that Catholicism uses to represent its faith, such as in “Conclave.” But “Your Mother” goes a step further, focusing on the subjective experience of transcendence and how individuals connect with God. It does this with liberal use of tight shots that keep the focus on Latif’s specific emotional vantage point and then uses highly symbolic imagery to represent him having supernatural experiences that connect him to God and his loved ones. This was done best previously in movies like Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” Most projects can nail one or the other. But “Your Mother” recognizes the importance of both and incorporates both in ways that feel organic rather than forced.
There is plenty of clever commentary and even satire about a Muslim’s place in the American secular and religious landscape. But most of it is well-integrated and delivered with clever subtlety. Movies like “Run Hide Fight: Infidels” portray the West as a good society under threat by Muslims and those who don’t recognize the Muslim threat. But “Your Mother” portrays the inverse of that.
Latif is trying to stop being a hitman for the sake of his faith and family — something he only did in the first place because American society refused to step up to kill bad people who harmed their communities. But he’s constantly bombarded with examples in his culture of a wider culture that celebrates violence as long as it’s not perpetrated by Muslims.
Latif’s son plays video games where the bad guys are ISIS and watches “Rambo” movies. Latif’s main antagonist is a Chinese American Pentecostal Christian who wears a cowboy outfit in the colors of the American flag, with the stars arranged in the shape of tiny white crosses. The choice to make the Christians highly evangelical Pentecostal is fitting as well. This means the Christians get to come off as emotional and chaotic, which contrasts with the more ritualized religious lives of the Muslim characters.
The way “Your Mother” handles masculinity and femininity in faith is also fascinating. Islam has a reputation for being a much more masculine religion than Christianity. (Atheist philosopher Sam Harris called it a “macho” religion.) There’s definitely some of the masculine portrayal of Islam in “Your Mother.”
Men tend to like the systems, structures and warfare rhetoric of religion, whereas women tend to like the relational, emotional side, so it’s fitting that “Your Mother” portrays the former so positively. It shows Imam Malik leading a group of praying men and calling Latif out for his hitman lifestyle. His son pushes to keep up with the call to prayer when Latif doesn’t want to. And the Christian vigilantes’ Pentecostal version of faith is portrayed as decidedly more emotional, unstructured and stereotypically feminine in its expression, preaching and music.
But on the flip side, there’s a strong undercurrent of femininity and love for women in “Your Mother” that resembles the kind often found in Christian faith-based films. The title of the film comes from a quote from the Hadith that the daughter reads in the film: “A man came to the Prophet and asked, ‘Who is most beloved to us, after you?’ The Prophet said, ‘Your mother.’ The man asked, ‘Then who?’ The Prophet said, ‘Your mother’ again. ‘Then who?’ ‘Your mother,’ the Prophet replied.”
The man asks again, “Who is next?” and the Prophet replies, “And then your father.” This prompts the son — who hears his sister read this aloud — to comment on the big shoes the dad needs to fill.
Women are portrayed as the backbone of the religious community, banding together to meet each other’s needs, and often as the spiritual backbone as well.
One obvious reason the film works is that director Bassam Tariq and actor Mahershala Ali are both Muslim. But there’s also a surprising amount of religious ecumenism in the film. Without giving spoilers, the film implies that God hears the prayers — prayers that are portrayed as real and active — of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike. I will be curious whether this becomes a point of critique in Muslim communities, just as Christians debate this point among ourselves.
It’s impossible to ignore the fact that in the past three years I’ve been reviewing faith-based films, the only movies that have successfully adapted the faith-based genre to action movies have been non-Christian ones. “Monkey Man” mashed up action with Hinduism by highlighting the faith as one full of gods who are liberating heroes. “Guns & Moses” imagined violence and forgiveness going hand in hand by imagining violence as a defensive move and redemption as an active move.
“Your Mother” is the most subversive in its use of violence, portraying violence as having value in protecting victims but otherwise being corrosive, and portraying forgiveness and mercy as the only true path forward.
Why have so few Christian films been able to successfully do something similar? It might be the fact that Christianity’s founder, Jesus, was so nonviolent that it makes it harder to integrate violence while still feeling distinctly Christian. This is why the early pre-Augustine church fathers almost universally had a nearly — if not totally — pacifist reading of Scripture. Islam’s founder, by contrast, was adept in both peace and war.
“Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” shows what it looks like to balance the internal and external realities of faith, faith with masculinity, mercy with violence, and faith-based and action-movie genres. In doing so, it pushes forward the medium’s ability to portray faith more broadly. The fact that it comes from and represents the American Muslim community is something that the community can be very proud of.
“Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” is in limited-release theaters now and opens wide Oct. 9.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. 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 josephholmesstudios.com.