Mother of Flies
Writers/Directors: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
Cast: John Adams, Lulu Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
When it comes to low-budget, DIY-minded horror, few filmmakers are doing it as well or as consistently as The Adams Family, the minds behind modern indie classics like The Deepy You Dig, Hellbender, and Where The Devil Roams. The family – who write, direct, edit, shoot, compose for, and star in their films, rotating credits all the time – have proven themselves masters of striking a haunting tone, playing with different subgenres, and weaving often delicate stories in very tight narrative spaces. They're so good at it that each film they make has become an event for genre fans.
And with Mother of Flies, they've delivered their best film yet.
Vibrantly beautiful, pierced through with aching notes of bittersweet fantasy and decorated throughout by moments of elegant gore, Mother of Flies emerges not just as a piece of folk horror but as a dark fairy tale, a spellbinding and intimate story that seems to take place in a pocket universe all its own, a world where anything is possible if you're willing to get your hands a little bloody, and get down in the dirt where the maggots play.
The film begins with Mickey (Zelda Adams), a teenager still battling a long back-and-forth with the cancer that previously took her hair and now seems determined to take everything else. With chemo and radiation treatments exhausted, Mickey's in search of alternative ways to stave off death, and she believes she's found a promising solution in Solveig (Toby Poser), a reclusive healer out in the woods. Mickey's father (John Adams), who's already lost his wife, is determined to see his daughter through whatever's coming next, even if he thinks his daughter is giving herself over to a snake oil salesman.
Solveig promises, with what we learn is typical vagueness, that her healing process will take three days, and welcomes father and daughter into her rustic home, where luxuries like electricity and indoor plumbing are not only unavailable, but entirely foreign to Solveig. As the film unfolds, beautifully orchestrated flashbacks reveal to us exactly why Solveig behaves this way, what she really wants, and what price she will extract for her services to Mickey.
Like Hellbender before it, this is a stripped down, back-to-nature kind of movie that relies on the backdrop of a gorgeous woodland to add production value, beauty, and menace in equal measure. Apart from a few preamble sequences, the woods and Solveig's house are the only locations, and supporting characters will only occasionally dot the landscape. It's a film almost entirely devoted to three people, immersed in the green world, exploring the mysteries of life and death, and yet the script – credited to John and Zelda Adams and to Poser – spins all of this into a luxurious, expansive web, turning a small production into a magical epic.
This is all embodied not just in the natural world, but in the performance turned in by Poser, who sets a new standard of great performances in Adams Family films, and brings her daughter and husband along for the ride, upping their game as she ups her own. As Solveig she is mysterious, ethereal, possibly malevolent, but every moment is laced with a deep, melancholic ache that slowly unspools before the audience as the film goes on. LIke other Adams Family films before it, Mother of Flies is not terribly interested in laying out an elaborate system of magical mythology for viewers to lean on. Its magic, feral and bloody and thick with the earthy aromas of soil, fungus, and bone, is more intuitive, driven by conviction and heartache, suggesting powers older than recorded time. As Solveig, Poser has to embody all of that, and pulls it off with room to spare.
But the most potent magic in Mother of Flies is still, as it always has been, the tender alchemy that comes from a family making a movie together, and it's a tenderness that reaches even deeper this time around. The film is a new entry in the ever-expanding and often contentious field of grief horror, but it's also not content to play by some of that subgenre's more conventional rules. In Mother of Flies, grief is not just for the loss of a loved one. It's for the person you could have been, the potential that's dried up, the magic that's lost. The intuitive magic displayed by the narrative and the characters is an opportunity for meditation on the rising and falling breath of the natural world which surrounds and infuses the entire movie. It invites us to consider not just the green, but what's rotting beneath the green, giving it life while simultaneously waiting for the day when all that green will be pulled down into the rot too, to feed green that hasn't yet been born. As Solveig says to Mickey about a preserved butterfly, it's just as beautiful dead as it was alive.
Mother of Flies asks us to contemplate that sustained beauty, dares us to dream of what beauty we might create even as we rot, then challenges us to find the truths that are shared between the dead and the living, the things that bind us in a greater web. It's a gorgeous emotional dance that speaks to how much this filmmaking team trusts each other, how much they continue to grow and mature as artists together. It's what makes Mother of Flies the best Adams Family film yet, one that every horror fan should put on their radar right now.
Mother of Flies arrives on Shudder in 2026.
