There’s a queasy thread of racial, political, and class tension running through A24’s theatrical horror movie The Front Room, alongside the Cronenbergian body horror and religious fantasy elements. It’s a complex, challenging project for twin brothers Sam and Max Eggers to take on as their directorial debut, after working on The Witch and The Lighthouse, respectively, under their director brother Robert Eggers.
Sam and Max Eggers adapted the film from a short story of the same name by The Woman in Black author Susan Hill, taken from the anthology The Travelling Bag — but as they told Polygon in an interview coinciding with the film’s release, they radically changed that story’s dynamics. The themes their changes bring to the surface are heavily felt throughout the film, but the Eggers brothers are very cautious about discussing those themes.
The one thing they seem most comfortable talking about is why they cast Brandy Norwood as their lead, Belinda, a heavily pregnant anthropology professor who suffers from strange visions as she tries to play polite host to her predatory, creepy mother-in-law Solange (Kathryn Hunter).
“We cast Kathryn first, and we were looking for our Cinderella,” Sam Eggers told Polygon. “And Brandy, of course, is Cinderella. It was amazing that she would read it and get it and relate to it. I think she wanted to do something different, and in that, she deserves all those kudos. But [we had a] stepmother antagonist, so we had to find a Cinderella. That was the inspiration.”
As The Front Room opens, Belinda and her husband, Norman (Andrew Burnap), are having money problems. Belinda is untenured, and her boss is handing off all her classes to other teachers, while dodging her and refusing to admit he’s doing either of those things. Is it because she’s Black? Because she’s heavily pregnant? Something else? It’s unclear, because he won’t articulate his decisions.
That kind of deliberate ambiguity stretches through the major action of the movie, leaving Belinda at sea in her career and at home. She and Norman are forced to take in his decrepit, fragile mother, Solange, a fervent Christian who immediately starts replacing Belinda’s collection of anthropological Goddess icons with crosses, among other invasive steps. Her beliefs manifest in weird ways throughout the movie. As Belinda deals with Solange’s racist microaggressions (and in one scene, macroaggressions) and her increasing demands and deceptions, Belinda starts having strange experiences of her own, while trying to navigate the truth: How much of this is real? How much is Solange lying about everything? Polygon spoke to the Eggers brothers about what they intended for all of this.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
What are you saying about religion in this movie? Plenty of movies these days explore ideas around evil aspects of the supernatural, around exorcism and demons, but it’s much rarer to see one present God as an active presence. How did you come to that dynamic?
Max Eggers: In the short story, the Irwins — the central couple — they’re faithful, and Solange is irreligious. So from the beginning, it was, OK, how do we deal with that, and how do we make it personal? What we decided to do was bring it to America, update the time period to today, and then flip that dynamic.
Then, when we’re talking about religion, you have these millennials — or Gen-Xers, someone in that sort of arena — against this antagonist, who is, let’s say, of the boomer generation. We’re not religious ourselves, so we could access it a little bit more authentically through Belinda’s perspective. But it also became not just about religion, but about generational divides, and how different generations seek to talk about and deal with religion.
It felt natural to us to have Belinda be an anthropologist who dealt with the mythic. She knows, through that lens, what a mother has been, through thousands of years, and what has happened to the Mother Goddess, so to speak. And then you have the natural antagonist, this faithful, Solange, who knows herself what is true, which is Christ. It spoke to us, by flipping it, about a sort of common, relatable, generational divide.
Sam Eggers: More specifically, Solange is a charismatic Evangelical, so she believes in the power of the Holy Spirit, and the power of tongues, and laying-on of hands. And I think it’s real to that person in the world today. They believe they can heal. They believe they can speak the word of God through the tongues. And it’s an interesting dynamic — as Solange decays, Belinda’s world begins to get weirder and stranger. Solange’s extreme belief has that effect on Belinda, so she begins to not understand — she confuses what’s real and what’s not, because of how much Solange believes.
There’s a version of this movie that’s about that clash of beliefs and that clash of generations, but that doesn’t have actual supernatural events or miracles in it. Why was it important to you to embrace that supernatural aspect?
Max: I think you hit the nail on the head with these questions about the ambiguity of belief. That was something that was so interesting to us. We took care of our grandfather as he declined. And when you’re dealing with death, and the fact that in this country, at least, there’s very little support for that, it becomes this sort of surreal world. Then throw into that what it’s like to be an expectant mother — that itself can be very surreal.
For us, it started with that idea of ambiguity. If you have this person who really is honest and heavily devout in their beliefs, and thinks they have the power of the Holy Spirit, it seems quite real. When people speak in tongues, they go into almost possessed trances. It’s quite effective and convincing. So when you’re dealing with a person who’s dying, and you’re dealing with pregnancy, let’s say — I don’t know. Maybe it is real!
It’s that interesting, ambiguous sort of soup. That really excited us creatively. Once we looked into things like the surrealist art movement, and places we could visually represent it, that again elicited a really exciting creative response.
Sam: I don’t know if you’ve ever had to take care of a [dying] family member. Our grandfather was quite with it mentally, but physically, he was declining. So he would do these things, and we didn’t know if we were seeing something that was done on purpose. Like, there was a moment where we came downstairs and there was blood on the wall, and we were like, How did that happen? It was so surreal.
So I think taking care of somebody in that surreal aspect — and obviously trying to be allegiant to the short story, where there’s overt horror stuff — begat Belinda’s visions, and [the movie’s sense of] the supernatural.
The idea of a boomer facing down younger people on issues like religion, bodily control, self-determination, racism, and being left with the burdens of carrying our elders, while being told at the same time that it’s our duty to respect, revere, and obey them — these all feel like very current, very political issues. Do you think of this as a political film?
Max: Identity today has proven very controversial, as far as how we treat each other, you know? Certainly there are relevant modern examples of someone like Belinda and someone like Solange that you could find throughout politics, throughout culture. When we updated it, when we moved it to this country, when we made Belinda the woman she is, politics was definitely in our mind. I think you just can’t escape that, unfortunately. As much as the movie is fun, hopefully, these are real, serious issues, and we wanted to tackle them. I think it’s important to bring them to the forefront and have that mirror reflected at us.
Was there something specific you wanted to say about these issues, or express on behalf of people like Belinda?
Max: I can’t speak on behalf of people like Belinda. We’re not trying to claim any kind of perspective that we don’t have, or didn’t earn. I think you could look to our Supreme Court as an example, to see a very common, similar story. Let me put it that way.
In the story, we deal a lot with myth and modern faith, belief. And I think something we were careful to say in the movie was — throughout the history of the Goddess, her symbols have been used as objects of possession. I think maybe that might be the cleanest way to sort of articulate it.
As you pointed out, you changed a lot of things from the original story, from the setup to the ending. What about the story hooked you in the first place? What was essential to it that made it interesting?
Sam: [Max] read it first, but I think it was the aspect of — we took care of our grandfather as he declined, and in the short story, Solange comes [to live with the Irwins] and she declines. So I think that aspect, we immediately related to, because it had pretty much happened as we read it. And we’re big fans of Susan Hill, of course. The Woman in Black? An amazing story. I think all the other stories in that book, The Travelling Bag, are incredible. So I think those two things drew us to the story.
