Matriarch (2022)

directed by Ben Steiner

UK

85 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Since a lot of us are probably still reeling a little from visiting family on Thanksgiving, I thought that now might be a good time to post a review of a film about coming back home. I wasn't planning on reviewing this, because I had seen some other reviewers seem to take a pretty dim view of it, so I was expecting something not worth mentioning, but to my surprise I actually got a lot more out of this than other people seem to have. This may still be a short review, but honestly I'm struggling to find reasons not to rate this even higher than I already did.

I guess some people might see a flaw in this if they're used to watching movies with characters who they can empathize with or understand. Our main character is not terribly heroic or easy to root for, not because her life is in shambles or because of who she is as a person but just because she doesn't have many traits in general. Her friendships and romances are the brightest spot in her life, and even those she seems to view as of secondary importance. This feels like watching somebody right before she realizes that other people in the world might care about her and like to see her be alive and happy, like watching a person who's been so traumatized by the way her mother treated her in childhood that she's categorized all other people besides herself as not worthwhile because she assumes they don't care. And aside from that, she's generally kind of bland. It's not that she doesn't have an engaging backstory, it's that she doesn't have much else outside of that backstory. Jemima Rooper is not terrible at playing this character, and certainly has a lot of acting experience to draw upon, but she becomes someone forgettable, without many facets. This is not very important to me, personally, but I can see where it might bog down the movie for others.

What this is above most other things, to me, was an aesthetics-based film. It is probably a personal fault that I can be so satisfied with something that just looks good and not worry too much about the deeper content, but in terms of film, I think the outward appearance of a thing can, sometimes, be enough to make up for not much plot. As long as it really is "not much" plot and not bad plot, and in Matriarch's case I believe it's the former. I'm extending "aesthetic" to include sound design as well, which is where I feel like this movie really excels; from minute one that score of sparse, eerie, was-that-the-wind noises provides a perfectly unsettling backdrop to an already unsettling chain of events. IMDb credits the music to Suvi-Eeva Äikäs, who also did the music for Hanna and Devs, two television series that have garnered praise for their soundtracks. Also, I believe that Finnish people are just inherently better at music. But anyway, in terms of the visual, this is a far cry from what I was thinking of when I was expecting this to be a folk horror movie - I guess there isn't one singular unified folk horror look, but you do expect some greenery and whatnot in a film like that, not the desolation and parched, freezing landscape we get here. The fertility of the Earth is a central theme - in fact, it may be the most central theme - but everything looks like the end of days, black and cold and withered. This deeply foreboding atmosphere and how well it was carried through all aspects of the film made up for a lot of other areas where it was lacking.

I want to talk a bit more about this in relation to the folk horror subgenre because I feel like where this succeeds is in how differently it approaches that whole motif. "Folk horror" is kind of a loose descriptor; it gets applied to a lot of different things, but a commonality that most of these things have is Pagan or "heretic" religious belief (or lack of belief) that exists outside of, or in direct opposition to, Christian religion. Typically this involves worship of the Earth or of some kind of nature spirit. There may not be too much depth to Matriarch, but there is something really interesting about the situation it presents, and the activity in the main character's home village is established as a very long-standing and intricate tradition. When you think about it, there really isn't anything else in the film - this is all about what's going on in the village. We see that tradition through the lens of how it has affected the main character's entire life. The fact that the story more than adequately (in my opinion) sets that up and shows us that it's a full belief system with a long history means that whatever else it does, this movie at least successfully pulls off the folk horror bit.

While the focus of the film is heavily on non-Christian ritual, there is one character, a priest, who represents the opposition to that. By his being so elderly I assume it's implied that he's been in the village since before the main character's mother discovered its secret, and is the last holdout against something he sees as antithetic to his beliefs. But... is this really about God as we're assuming it is? Maybe this is just because the movie lacks certain details, but I created my own headcanon where when the priest is talking about the activities of the villagers as "against God", he's not talking about the Christian God, but the god that they are worshipping - he believes in it and serves it too, and he sees what they're doing to her as an abomination. Imagining that that old priest has always known about the thing the villagers are connected to makes their tradition appear to be even older - the only innovation, paralleling the rapid exploitation of the planet by humans, is that now they've appropriated its power for themselves.

And, back to aesthetics for a moment, I just loved the look of... that. Her. I'm struggling not to completely spoil this, but if you've seen it, you know who I'm talking about. The CGI is a little dodgy but I've started to not care about that too much. It's more important to me that I can tell the idea is there, even if it's rough around the edges. The entity I'm talking about looks so striking and otherworldly (well, technically it's very worldly, but you get it). There was such a strong idea here, the black mud and the worms and the life of the soil, the ground, leeching into the villagers, them dabbling in things that they didn't understand. It's so... I don't know, poetic? I think "striking" is the best word. Can you appreciate a movie based on a single image alone, rather than the bigger picture? Sometimes I can, at least.