‘You Are Not My Mother’: a kind of Irish horror

Above : “You Are Not My Mother” opens Friday the Magic Lantern Theatre. (Photo/Magnet Releasing)

Horror movies come in all forms. But for me, the best examples are those that come from, or at least believably simulate, real-life experiences.

“You Are Not My Mother,” a film written and directed by Irish filmmaker Kate Dolan , is one of those films. Opening on Friday at the Magic Lantern Theatre, Dolan’s film blends teen angst and mental illness with the specter of, as one critic puts it, “an updating of a classic Irish folk tale about changelings and doppelgangers.”

That critic, Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com, wrote of “You Are Not My Mother” that with “fantastically committed performances and a deft management of tone, it’s one of the better genre films of 2021.”

Hazel Doupe stars as a Dublin teenager named Char whose school life is marked by bullying and whose home life involves a mother who, after disappearing for a night, returns – yet somehow changed. Delving into family secrets, Char tries to get to the heart of what may be a supernatural mystery.

Other critics are as equally positive as Tallerico.

Cath Clarke of The Guardian wrote, “Dolan pulls off some terrifying moments using pleasingly lo-fi techniques: something revealed in a mirror that made me yelp; the sickening snap of a bone breaking; a limb twisted grotesquely. And intense performances by (Hazel) Doupe and (Carolyn) Bracken give it a real emotional pulse.”

And Tara Brady of the Irish Times wrote, “For much of its impressive duration, Dolan’s film blurs the line between family friction, bipolar disorder and the supernatural.”

It’s past St. Patrick’s Day, but the spell of Irish folklore is clearly still with us.