You Are Not My Mother

You Are Not My Moth­er opens with a cul de sac at night, and at the end of it, all alone in the mid­dle of the road, a baby gur­gling in a bug­gy under a sin­gle street lamp. Shot wide to empha­sise the baby’s com­plete iso­la­tion, it is an alarm­ing image of neglect. Yet there are peo­ple on the out­er fringes of this pic­ture – as the cam­era gets clos­er, we see two women out of focus in the back­ground appar­ent­ly engaged in an alter­ca­tion, and then one of them limps up and push­es the bug­gy into the woods.

Fol­low­ing hand-drawn instruc­tions from a book, she traces a cir­cle around the baby seat­ed in the dirt, and lights a fire all about it – and the film’s accusato­ry title appears, under­scor­ing the hor­rif­ic treat­ment that this baby is hav­ing to endure.

It will turn out that the limp­ing woman was indeed not the protagonist’s moth­er, but her grand­moth­er Rita (Ingrid Craigie). Now, that baby has grown up into teenaged, facial­ly scarred Char (Hazel Doupe) – bright and resource­ful, and get­ting excel­lent grades at school, but also friend­less, and hav­ing to cope with a trou­bled home life. Granny Rita, though lov­ing, is invalid, and Rita’s daugh­ter – Char’s moth­er Angela (Car­olyn Brack­en) – is so depressed and dis­tract­ed that she has become an absence in her own house, bare­ly ever man­ag­ing to get out of bed.

“I don’t think I can do this any­more,” Angela tells Char on a rare out­ing – short­ly there­after she dis­ap­pears entire­ly, leav­ing her car with its door wide open in the mid­dle of a field. The police come over, as does Angela’s broth­er Aaron (Paul Reid) – and then, with­out warn­ing or expla­na­tion, Angela reappears.

Now on a cock­tail of med­ica­tions for her psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders, Angela seems gen­uine­ly to have improved – cook­ing, dress­ing bright­ly and danc­ing. Yet as Samhain approach­es – ​“a time”, as the guide (Madi O’Carroll) on a school excur­sion puts it, ​“when the vale between our world and the oth­er world was at its thinnest, allow­ing spir­its to pass through” – Char starts to won­der if this changed woman who has returned to the house is her moth­er at all.

Cer­tain­ly Granny Rita, who fash­ions pro­tec­tive charms from local flo­ra, is con­vinced that some­thing oth­er­world­ly has invad­ed their home, pos­ing a threat to all. Mean­while Char’s sym­pa­thet­ic new school­friend Suzanne (Jor­danne Jones) is also hav­ing to live with men­tal ill­ness and ghosts from the past.

Writ­ten and direct­ed by Kate Dolan, You Are Not My Moth­er lets Loachi­an real­ism cohab­it with super­nat­ur­al sur­re­al­ism, and leaves the view­er to decide which mode of rep­re­sen­ta­tion gets clos­er to the truth of this domes­tic sit­u­a­tion. For while there is clear­ly some­thing very dys­func­tion­al about the Delaney house­hold, it remains rather less clear whether it is a mali­cious spir­it of Celtic folk­lore who has infil­trat­ed the fam­i­ly in an attempt to reclaim the baby it once lost, or it is men­tal ill­ness (of a Hered­i­tary vari­ety) that afflicts this bro­ken home. Either way, rit­u­al and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion are in order – but only after an ordeal which will change everything.

As behav­iours and lore are passed down the gen­er­a­tions in matri­lin­eal fash­ion, soon Granny’s limp will be on some­one else’s foot, and her heal­ing charms in some­one else’s mak­ing, in a nar­ra­tive where ancient tra­di­tions stag­ger their way into con­tem­po­rary North­ern Ire­land. For some­times the only thing that will bridge the lim­i­nal space between the present and a trau­mat­ic, irra­tional past is the pow­er of myth itself. Dolan ensures that such myth comes with a dark goth­ic edge, unnerv­ing, insid­i­ous and uncan­ni­ly ambigu­ous, as this clan’s inter­nal prob­lems find their expres­sion in high­ly incen­di­ary rites of Cap­gras cleansing.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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