MOTHER OF FLIES (2025)

Studio:   Shudder
Director: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
Writer:   John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
Producer: Toby Poser
Stars:    Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, John Adams, Lulu Adams

Review Score:

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Summary:

A terminally ill college student and her widower father seek an unconventional cure from a woman who may be a woodland witch.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Having seen the woman in a dream, terminally ill college student Mickey, whose unsuccessful cancer treatment has left her with only a few months to live, convinces her widower father Jake to accompany her to remote woods where they meet with an apparent witch named Solveig. Presumed to be practicing holistic medicine but actually engaging in dark magic, Solveig promises she can cure Mickey with a three-day ritual at no charge. Solveig welcomes Mickey and Jake into a cabin-like house built into the trees where there is no running water and they sleep on beds of moss. Although Jake remains skeptical, Mickey insists on trying Solveig’s unusual healing methods out of desperation.

Solveig performs a blood ritual over mushrooms and berries she serves to Jake and Mickey. Solveig reacts strongly when Jake says, “Amen,” and forces him to spit on the floor to abolish the word. Jake finds it strange that Solveig only eats a dead butterfly.

Following a nighttime discussion with her father about prayers and faith, Mickey dreams of wandering in the forest. In her vision, Mickey sees Solveig naked, covered in blood, and writhing in tall grass.

Suggesting he needs his own cure for anger, sadness, and loneliness, Solveig prepares Jake a tea made from hemlock root on their second day together. Mickey declines to drink it.

Once he’s left alone in the treehouse, Jake begins violently vomiting blood. While hunched over on the floor, Jake sees a vision of a woman’s shriveled corpse outside.

Solveig escorts Mickey deeper into the forest to perform another ritual. With Mickey lying prone on a rock, Solveig uses a knife to slice her hand. Solveig’s dripping blood causes Mickey’s stomach to painfully melt open in a gruesome gape.

When the women return, Jake expresses shock at Mickey’s stomach wound. Suspecting the witch of being a fraud, Jake asks Mickey if she has noticed how Solveig is always surrounded by flies.

For dinner, Solveig serves Jake and Mickey an apparent meat she claims is venison. Jake mentions to Mickey how he finds it odd that Solveig never eats yet he is always starving.

Jake is woken in the night by a drunk couple tossing rocks at a towering cairn outside the treehouse. After he accuses them of disrespecting Solveig, the couple laughingly insults Jake before driving away.

Unbeknownst to his daughter, Jake is left behind at the treehouse entranced and with maggots writhing in his open mouth to start the third day. Meanwhile, Solveig again escorts Mickey into the woods for another ritual. On the way, Solveig notices a dead deer now returned to life after she previously performed her magic on it.

Mickey asks Solveig why she is helping her. Solveig responds, “Your curse is my gift.” After using a small tree branch to entrance Mickey, a large snake Solveig swallowed earlier that morning transfers from her throat into Mickey’s.

Mickey returns to the treehouse. Worried that his daughter’s condition is worsening, Jake again claims Solveig is peddling false hope as he insists he cannot play along anymore. Frustrated because he hasn’t been taking the experience seriously, Mickey screams at Jake until he agrees to drive away.

After writhing painfully while her stomach wound pulses, Mickey runs outside the treehouse as though she is suddenly fearful. Solveig watches Mickey flee into the woods.

Jake goes to a motel where the subject of Solveig comes up with the receptionist, Ruthie. Ruthie remarks that Solveig is purportedly a necromancer who can “trick death, even her own.” Responding to Jake’s question, Ruthie elaborates that people have been adding stones onto Solveig’s grave for years to keep her in the ground, which confuses Jake because he believes she is alive. Ruthie recounts a local legend, also depicted in gradual flashbacks, that says that several hundred years ago, Solveig brought a stillborn baby back from the dead and kept it as her own. When villagers including the child’s mother found out, they burned the “zombie” infant in a fire, stoned Solveig, and buried her alive as she screamed for “her” child. Jake asks about Solveig’s house, but Ruthie claims there is no house alongside Solveig’s grave, prompting Jake to immediately race back to the forest.

Solveig confronts Mickey while she lies entranced in the woods. Solveig tells Mickey she came to her because Mickey heard Solveig’s screams from the dirt, opening a pathway for the witch to finally rise again. Jutting her small tree branch into Mickey’s stomach wound, Solveig pulls out a tumorous clump she shapes into a fetus. Solveig then cradles the molded mass until it grows into a small baby.

Jake returns to where the treehouse was to find his daughter collapsed on Solveig’s burial cairn. Mickey cries, “She took it.” Jake and Mickey tearfully embrace.

That night, Jake and Mickey dig up Solveig’s grave and find a woman’s skeleton cradling an infant’s skeleton. Jake and Mickey exchange knowing looks.

Sometime later, Mickey and her father visit an oncologist who tells them Mickey not only shows no signs of cancer, but no signs of radiation damage or chemical burns from her chemotherapy either. Baffled, the oncologist exclaims that he cannot believe the test results. Declining any further testing, Mickey responds, “We believe it.” Jake smirks.

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Review:

Watching an Adams Family film can be like watching Doctor Frankenstein furiously flitting about in his lab. Their experiments don’t always yield optimal results. Sometimes, overambition might stitch together a lumbering hulk whose stapled scars mar the artistic beauty beneath indie brutishness. Other times though, the Adamses will make a monster of a movie that’s a vision to behold. Whatever the outcome, you can still recognize you’re in the presence of passion, as their homespun creations are always inspired works of macabre madness that ordinary minds couldn’t come close to conceiving.

Following divergent forays that took them deeper than ever into arthouse aesthetics with “Where the Devil Roams” (review here), then closer toward mainstream creature features with the paranoia thriller “Hell Hole” (review here), “Mother of Flies” sees the First Family of DIY Frights making a welcome return to the familiar folk horror where they originally made their mark in “The Deeper You Dig” (review here) and “Hellbender” (review here). Whether the credit goes to taking time off to detour down different pathways or to simply revisiting their roots, “Mother of Flies” recaptures similar senses of omnipresent dread and backwoods witchiness as those earlier endeavors did, but it does so without feeling like a mere remix of previously covered ground.

Father John Adams and daughter Zelda Adams play Jake and Mickey. She’s a terminally ill university student whose search for a cancer cure has exhausted all standard treatment methods. He’s a concerned father willing to do anything for his desperate daughter, which is why Jake sets aside his skepticism to spend three days in the forest with Mickey and a nature-based witch named Solveig (their real-life wife/mother Toby Poser).

As is often the case when taking an unusual outing with the Adamses, “Mother of Flies” starts with a brief tour of remote rural reaches like a roadside diner and a non-chain motel, places people from cities seldom see unless they’re on a long drive. That’s part of how this filmmaking group starts submerging viewers in an organic setting that’s lived-in and real. Once we’re settled into a space that seems safe, then they can gradually layer in unsettling cerebral suggestions in an intangible manner that’s difficult to put a finger on.

When Mickey and Jake get to the woods, Solveig sets them up in a cabin-like house built directly into the trees. Beds of moss are their mattresses. Berries and mushrooms are their meals. Such accommodations are certainly strange, in an almost amusing way for a meat-eating man like Jake. It’s the other elements of oddness that don’t seem so harmless.

Amidst blood magic rituals where Solveig turns Mickey’s stomach into a gruesomely gaping maw, flashbacks glimpse darker times when robed villagers sought similar salves for their pain. Mickey sees visions of Solveig writhing in brownish gore while shriveled corpses seemingly speak to her father. Whatever Solveig really wants and how Mickey fits in with those plans are only two pieces of a supernatural mystery that will challenge what Jake and his daughter believe, and how far they’re willing to test their conceptions of faith.

That’s pretty much the end of what can be summarized in literal terms. Although visceral terror consistently plays a part, the bulk of “Mother of Flies” concentrates on subtext and context whose contemplative nature can be poetic for some and ponderous for others. Solveig’s voiceovers are steeped in solemn reveries such as, “How easily the brittle limbs of the rootless tree bend and snap in the honest wind,” and, “The truth won’t hide in dreams, it lies still, seen, the whore, majestic, like echoes of the banshees bouncing in a canyon.”

It isn’t just her monologues that lean heavy into cryptic philosophy. Mickey’s musings wade in equally esoteric waters, though her meanings are more quantifiable when she says something like, “I don’t believe in prayer. I have always believed in faith. And when people pray, it’s because they have a lack of faith. A lack of faith that life will give what it’s supposed to give, and death will bring what it’s supposed to bring.”

Yet all of these arrows strike at the heart of what “Mother of Flies” is really about as well as the ideas it wishes to impart. Lurking between linear lines of horror is a thoughtful meditation on death folded into a midnight movie. This time around, the Adams Family’s signature slow burn wafts smoke carrying a vague scent of unholiness, or at least a little blasphemy to taunt common religious trappings while also thumbing its nose at traditional filmmaking conventions. A couple of confusing edits combine with patient pacing to lose shorter attention spans, while anyone facing a grave illness, or the memory of coping with one, will find their personal perspectives melting into what becomes a haunting experience for those who relate to the tragic themes.

No matter what, fans like myself whose enthusiasm perhaps wavered with their preceding two features should have their faith in the Adams Family’s unique artistry restored through “Mother of Flies.” They’re as raw as they’ve ever been, which in this exception is a compliment for filmmakers who’ve already made multiple movies. While other families are playing Settlers of Catan together on game night or taking their toddlers to Chuck E. Cheese, Toby Poser, John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Lulu Adams’s Wonder Wheel Productions remains busy crafting wonderfully weird efforts that display a quiet creepiness and fearless confidence other indies on microbudgets just don’t possess.

Review Score: 75

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