“Being cooped up with a newborn and a mother-in-law can drive anyone crazy.” So says Brandy Norwood’s embattled mother-to-be Belinda in the nerve-fraying new trailer for A24’s The Front Room — and honestly, on present evidence that may well be an understatement. Hailing from co-writer/director duo Max and Sam Eggers — brothers of Nosferatu filmmaker Robert Eggers — the siblings’ psychological horror, based on Susan Hill’s short story of the same name, sees a young, newly pregnant couple’s (Norwood and Andrew Burnap) lives upended when the husband’s stepmother (Kathryn Hunter) comes to stay. Check out the unsettling first trailer for the movie below;
What can we say? The Front Room‘s got it all. Dead fathers, profane religious imagery, Hunter on even creepier form than she was in The Tragedy Of Macbeth, and a power struggle for the soul of a newborn child — it looks like twins Max and Sam are a chip off the old Eggers block! And who’d have guessed it was the brothers’ directorial debut? In this trailer alone, it’s clear that the duo have a distinctive visual sensibility whilst feeling right at home with A24’s established house style of socially conscious, tonally off-kilter elevated chillers. From that shot of Hunter’s satanic-seeming step-mother as the Virgin Mary, to some unsavoury dinner table racism, to the prominent presence of shadow-cast crucifixes and Norwood’s instantly iconic “My name is Belinda! BE-LIN-DA!”, it’s clear there’s a lot more going on here than first meets the eye.
Though The Front Room marks the Eggers brothers’ first time helming a feature, the pair do already have some skin in the genre game, with Max having previously co-written Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse and Sam — co-writer of 2018 doc Olympia — serving as a production assistant on The Witch. As for what thrills and chills their directorial debut may ultimately bring us, audiences Stateside will find out when The Front Room hits US cinemas on 6 September. As for us here in the UK, no release has been confirmed just yet, but you can guarantee we’ll be seated just as soon as it gets here.
