Movie Review: 'The Front Room' Starring Brandy Norwood

The Front Room (2024)

Directed by Sam and Max Eggers

Written by Sam and Max Eggers

Starring Brandy Norwood, Kathryn Hunter, Andrew Burnap

Release Date September 6th, 2024

Published September 10th, 2024

I have a strong stomach for movies containing gross stuff. I have experienced the body horror of David Cronenberg, the horrors of numerous legendary horror movies, and I’ve endured the sight of Jon Voight’s stupid face. The point is, I can take a lot after more than 24 years of watching and writing about movies and yet, The Front Room grossed me out. The Front Room turned my stomach. Body horror is one thing but Bodily Function horror is an altogether different kind of horror, and one that I am not a fan of.

The Front Room stars Brandy Norwood as Belinda, a college professor who is more than 8 months pregnant. Belinda and her husband, Norman (Andrew Burnap), have bought a new home but the purchase has them struggling financially. That struggle becomes even more daunting when Belinda is pushed out of her teaching position by simply no longer being scheduled for classes. It’s at this point that Norman finds out that his distant father has passed away. The two weren’t close and Norman hints that there was emotional and physical abuse involved, much of it related to his stepmother, Solange (Kathryn Hunter).

Attending Norman’s father’s funeral out of a sense of obligation and politeness, the couple is surprised to learn that Solange has a gift for them in Norman’s father’s will. The couple will receive a sizable inheritance but only if they take in Solange and take care of her. Norman is opposed to the idea but Belinda is quick to remind him about their flagging mortgage and the new baby they will soon be caring for. Norman relents and Solange comes home with them on this same day.

Naturally, this is not a good fit. Solange is a fundamentalist who practices a form of religion that includes speaking in tongues, laying of hands, and other extreme forms of worship. Solange is also rude, racist, and judgmental. She mocks their home, their decor, and openly insults Belinda’s cooking, all under the guise of ‘telling it like it is.’ Eventually, this obnoxious behavior takes on a more sinister quality and the movie hints at Solange having a sort of supernatural power that is causing Belinda to hallucinate and sleepwalk. Solange seems to know things that she would have no way of knowing and she begins to use this knowledge against Belinda, especially when the two are alone and it becomes a she-said-she-said scenario.

Where I part ways with The Front Room is when the film begins to introduce bodily functions as a form of horror. Solange is incontinent and because she can’t move around well, she walks with two canes and cannot go upstairs, she begins to urinate everywhere and eventually makes an M E S S mess on her bed when she’s unable to get to the bathroom. Here, Max and Sam Eggers decide to graphically depict Solange’s accidents. While Norman is at work and Belinda is caring for both their baby and Solange, the film becomes covered in feces and urine as Solange weaponizes her bowels to torture her unwilling caretaker.

Why? Why do this? What purpose does it serve to cover the movie in feces? Is it gross? Sure. Does it demonstrate how truly awful and obnoxious Solange is? Absolutely. Could these same points be made without fecal matter spread on doors, floors, and the clothes of our main character? Definitely. Sadly, the writer-director duo seems to have no other idea for creating horror during the film’s second act. I kept waiting for the movie to move on to something more interesting and scary and instead, the movie kept doubling down on fecal matter.

Eventually, I was left wondering why this movie exists at all. The Front Room feels like a pointless exercise in the edgy notion that maybe it’s okay to want to kill some people. I could speculate that the point is that Solange represents values and ideals that need to be condemned, killed off, and left deep in the past but I was too busy retching to spend much time thinking about the broader points the filmmakers may have been trying to make about how racism isn’t merely something we can disagree about.

If, indeed, the point of The Front Room is to call out the fact that racism isn’t a policy we can agree to disagree about, I agree with them. The movie aligns with my view that we cannot compromise with bigots, we need to eradicate their bigotry. But the point is lost on me when I am too busy trying to hold my lunch down. The Front Room may have its heart in the right place but that’s just a guess on my part. I can assume that they have a larger point in play but I can’t get past all of the urine and feces on the walls and furniture to see the bigger picture.

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