Mom and Dad

There are points in the fes­ti­val whirr of end­less films, lit­tle sleep, ter­ri­ble food and wan­ton debauch­ery at which one’s soul is deplet­ed, one’s body is weary and one’s mind has lit­tle capac­i­ty to take in a new nar­ra­tives, let alone sub­ject them to inci­sive analy­sis for the ben­e­fit of a read­er­ship. At these points, it is this writer’s fer­vent wish that every­one is giv­en the cin­e­mat­ic won­der-drug, the pure-grade motion pic­ture adren­a­line shot that is Nico­las Cage run­ning amok.

Mom and Dad is brought to you by Bri­an Tay­lor, mak­ing his debut as a solo fea­ture direc­tor after col­lab­o­rat­ing with Mark Nevel­dine on Crank and Ghost Rid­er: Spir­it of Vengeance. The con­cept is sim­ple: par­ents are sud­den­ly pos­sessed by the urge to kill their chil­dren. Told from the per­spec­tive of Car­ly (Anne Win­ters), who has a lit­tle broth­er to pro­tect from mom (Sel­ma Blair) and dad (Nico­las Cage), this cat-and-mouse day-in-the-life-of hor­ror film plays at a deli­cious com­ic pitch.

The humour stems from the mat­ter-of-fact way in which par­ents want­i­ng to kill their off­spring is pre­sent­ed. Although con­tex­tu­al vignettes are spritzed across the nar­ra­tive, there is no anguished expo­si­tion over how this unnat­ur­al urge has arisen. Ter­mi­na­tors are awok­en by the sound of an elec­tron­ic fiz­zle, a wild look in the eyes and then – boom – moth­er dear­est is hell­bent on stran­gling, shoot­ing, explod­ing, maim­ing with a coat hang­er or attack­ing with what­ev­er tool is to hand.

Con­trast­ed by the con­fu­sion of kids just liv­ing their nor­mal lives, the absur­di­ty of par­ents turn­ing into assas­sins is wrung for ghoul­ish glee. A baby is born to a moth­er who wants to tear it apart to the sim­per­ing musi­cal cue of ​‘It Must Have Been Love’. This scene crys­tallis­es how much plea­sure the film takes in the sheer wrong­ness of its char­ac­ters’ impulses.

This is not a con­cept that has many places to go, although a ring at the lead family’s front door brings in an addi­tion­al lay­er, spin­ning ever more hys­ter­i­cal action sequences. The chief delights of this film are the per­for­mances. Sel­ma Blair is sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly nat­u­ral­is­tic as a woman who gave up her career to be a moth­er and now won­ders what her options are. This is off­set at every turn by Cage, whose line read­ing is unpre­dictable and whose move­ment is flam­boy­ant­ly deranged.

“That’s why I got in the movie busi­ness, I want to rock you, I want to shock you,” Cage said to Dead­line after the film’s TIFF pre­mière. Rock and shock he does, like an old-school enter­tain­er or an evil clown pos­sessed by enough ener­gy to wake the dead, or low­er still a film crit­ic blud­geoned by fes­ti­val excesses.