Film Review: The Mother, the Menacer, and Me
Director: Jon Salmon
Genre: Comedy, Horror
Format: Streaming
Purchase Link: Available on Apple+
Eddie, about to be a dad of two, is broke, desperate, and an aspiring horror filmmaker. To save money, he and his pregnant wife move into his mother-in-law’s home, where he faces not only her disapproval of him, but numerous challenges with his film in progress. It’s a killer script: a masked Menacer who kills “Karens.” Unfortunately, everything keeps going wrong: props malfunction, money is tight, the main actor is jailed. Money and time are both running out. With the pressure mounting, Eddie sets his sights on an upcoming film festival, where the Menacer could be picked up for production.
The Mother, the Menacer, and Me is a sweet, adult coming of age movie. It uses the horror genre to do what it does best – expose the shortcomings of capitalism, especially its negative effect on art. Eddie’s primary worries while making his movie are, where am I gonna find the money? How am I gonna get this in front of the right people?
Art and artists face more challenges than ever in finding audiences: financial barriers, nepotism, AI and algorithms, fancy executives who wouldn’t know real art if it hit them right in the face. But also – maybe most so – it suffers from the idea that artistic dreams are somehow childish. We see this narrative pushed by Nancy, Eddie’s opinionated mother-in-law, played perfectly by Lorraine Bracco. She’s dead set against Eddie’s “childish” aspirations, constantly pushing him to get a job at the local car dealership because, well, it’s realistic. Eddie needs money. He has a family. And yet, he also has a dream.
“When are you gonna grow up?” Nancy asks. “I mean, all I see is Peter Pan.”
The movie could’ve stayed here – asking more questions about how we engage in art, what we sacrifice for it, and how impossible it feels to let go of our passions. But it goes even deeper after Eddie wins the film festival and is invited to Hollywood to get the project into production. Here is where the coming of age occurs, when Eddie realizes his beloved Menacer will be slaughtered by rich executives who don’t understand the point of his work.
“You got the show, and now you know the truth. It’s not a chocolate factory, it’s a butcher shop.”
Because the movie is a comedy, this lesson doesn’t come through as dramatically as it feels in real life. It’s very hard to watch a dream turn out differently than you hoped. I’m not a thirty-something dad living in his mother-in-law's house making a horror movie. But as a thirty-something lesbian living in a tiny desert home, writing a play for the first time, I can understand the pressure to finally “make” something happen with your art, whatever that is. And, like the characters in the movie, I also can understand that the process of creating art and the having of the dream are sometimes all we get, that the end goal oftentimes fails to meet expectations.
“All glory is fleeting,” Eddie’s best friend says near the end of the movie, and it’s true. Eddie made his movie, won the festival award, and... now what? We see Nancy asking the same questions of her own life, as she puts off her dream of moving into a fancy senior community to support her growing family.
The Mother, the Menacer, and Me gives audiences a thoughtful slice of life. We have strong performances from James Austin Kerr, Alfonso Caballero, and Lorraine Bracco. The movie’s world seems small, but its themes are universal, and it has a strong, beating heart. I truly believe these kinds of films are becoming rarer and more important to make as the world gets darker around us.
I watched this movie because Lorraine is my absolute favorite and was pleasantly surprised by how deeply its themes resonated. 4/5.
Review By Chelsea Catherine
Chelsea Catherine’s Website
