Eclectic tension – Kommersant newspaper No. 142 (7343) of 08/06/2022

Craig David Wallace’s thriller Mother’s Curse: Survival Hide and Seek was released. The film does not quite live up to the expectations that its Russian title creates, but it only benefits him, he believes. Yulia Shagelman.

“Curse”, “survival” and a hint of dangerous games with death – in fact, the trick of distributors, luring viewers into empty theaters with the promise of horror. The beginning of the picture seems to indicate the same genre affiliation: disturbing music sounds behind the scenes, in the frame we see first a deserted road, therefore a house standing alone in the outskirts, then a blindfolded girl who sits in this house on the couch. In front of her is the silhouette of an adult who holds a huge knife in his hand, the camera lingers on it close-up. In fact, the girl Beth (Tessa Cosma) has a birthday, she turns nine years old, and the woman with a knife in her hand is her mother Kate (Laura Burke), who baked a birthday cake for her daughter and is now preparing to cut it. But after a completely innocent family scene, an uncomfortable feeling of anxiety will remain, which will only grow as the film progresses.

The relationship between mother and daughter does not look harmonious from the very beginning. In a house on the outskirts, they were clearly not from a good life, but Kate is trying her best to maintain the appearance of normality and organize for Beth, albeit a modest, but still a holiday. The girl is naughty and takes any action of her mother with hostility. Gradually it turns out that a terrible tragedy has occurred in their family: Beth’s father is in prison on charges of murdering a neighbor girl, the same age as his daughter, which he committed two years ago, and Kate herself told the police about this. Since then, the mother and daughter have been hiding in the wilderness in a witness protection program that is supposed to save them from the revenge of the victim’s parents. But if an adult woman is constantly haunted by nightmarish memories of what happened and is tormented by guilt, then the girl seems strangely indifferent.

Kate and Beth won’t be alone with each other for very long. First, a police officer (Colin Paradine) in charge of their security, whose connection to Kate goes beyond his professional duties, will appear on the threshold of their shelter, which further increases the tension between mother and daughter. And then the vague shadows flickering in the depths of the frame will turn into two “guests” who appear without an invitation and with completely unfriendly intentions. But it’s worth considering that now we know exactly where the director and his co-writer Ian Malone will lead us, how they will again be able to deceive us.

Pretending to be a hermetic family drama and a horror about home invasions by aggressive strangers, The Mother’s Curse eventually turns into a well-knit and tightly wound thriller about dark family secrets and the power of a mother’s instinct that surpasses even the instinct of self-preservation. Although not all plot twists are truly unexpected (the main one can be guessed twenty minutes before the authors reveal the secret), the narrative stretches are redeemed by the convincing performance of two actresses – an adult and a young one – in the lead roles. And even if the ending is less surprising than we would like, the gaze of a little girl with a big secret is not soon forgotten.