Review: MUM & DAD (2008)

MUM & DAD (2008)
Director: Steven Sheil
Screenplay: Steven Sheil
Cast: Olga Fedori, Perry Benson, Dido Miles, Ainsley Howard, Toby Alexander, Micaiah Darling
Studio: Revolver Entertainment

McBEARDO McNUGGET
Chop-chop, cheerio! The UK enters the global torture porn sweepstakes with Mum & Dad, a tale of forced adoption and familial misery with enough admirable touches, both gross-out and otherwise, to create a memorable, perversely enjoyable trip down the increasingly familiar chained-up-and-beaten-senseless rabbit hole.

SYNOPSIS
Polish immigrant Lena (Olga Fedori) labors as a cleaner at Heathrow Airport, where she befriends sticky-fingered Birdie (Ainsley Howard) and Birdie’s mute brother Elbie (Toby Alexander).

After missing her bus, Lena goes home with Birdie and Elbie, where she is knocked out, tied up, and told that she’s been “adopted” by shrieking Mum (Dido Miles) and blood-soaked Dad (Perry Benson).

Lena’s life becomes beatings, mutilation, and torments that include organizing the clothes and other loot the family steals from airline luggage (Dad also works at Heathrow).

(SPOILERS BELOW)

After the family executes and disposes of multiple other passersby, Lena stumbles on to Dad’s natural daughter Angela (Micaiah Darling), a broken, barely living wreck who reflexively lifts her skirt when she detects a visitor.

Christmas morning erupts into an orgy of wild violence, as the family celebrates before the maimed body of a still-living victim whose hands are nailed up over their mantelpiece and whose penis is nailed into his own leg.

Lena ultimately overpowers her captors, killing them all except sympathetic Elbie, then raging in the daylight as Heathrow’s air traffic zooms overhead.

McBLOVIATION
The opening scenes of Mum & Dad play out unmistakably as a BBC drama chronicling life among the working class at Heathrow Airport. And, with its appealing cast and credible dialogue, it seems like a good, engaging BBC drama at that.

In fact, if you hadn’t picked Mum & Dad out of the horror section, the shock of what happens to Lena after her shift ends would be one of the great jolts in cinema.

Alas, there’s no hiding the nature of Mum & Dad (or anything) anymore, and when this lovely, likable young woman gets a crack in the skull and jugular full of narcotics, the only proper response today is: “What? AGAIN?!”

At that moment, what came to mind for me was sitting at a theater in early 1990, watching The First Power not long after having seen Shocker, Prison, and The Chair in rapid succession, and hearing my pal Springo whisper: “If you told me six months ago that I’d be sitting through this exact plot five times in a row….”

And so Saw begat Wolf Creek begat Hostel begat Turistas begat Live Feed begat Martyrs begat Mum & Dad and so on (with, yes, dozens of other titles among the begats and, no, they are not all directly begotten from one another). Same as with the slashers, same as with the vampires-as-addicts, same as with zombiemania, same as always.

Unlike the aforementioned executed-killer-kills-again cycle, though, “torture porn” has yielded numerous interesting results, even from Hollywood (the first Hostel and the third Saw) and, in Martyrs, a transgressive classic.

Mum & Dad is exceedingly well-made and, affably, very British. The paper crowns and swilled brandy on Christmas morning will butter the crumpets of even the most committed Anglophobe.

First-time writer-director Steven Sheil elicits excellent performances from the uniformly convincing cast while exhibiting tight control as Mum & Dad shifts from workplace study to abject horror to Paul-Bartel-style black comedy.

Sheil also loads the proceedings with unique conceptual touches, punctuating each scene with planes taking off, inadvertently tormenting the unfortunates trapped below.

Perry Benson’s Dad is a monster for the ages, from his semen-sopped organ-meat fuck to his inability to read The Daily Mail in peace to his final prettied-up come-on.

As the frequently voiceless Lena, Olga Fedori puts her museum-piece face to unpredictable use, communicating emotions that fit her character more than they obviously fit her situation.

By the end, Lena’s scowl of dismissive disgust makes her final rampage inevitable – she will not succumb to these pigs, these assholes, these … losers.

With Saw 6 looming come Halloween weekend, we’re deep into the torture porn moment. That as straightforward an example as Mum & Dad can do so much, so originally, with the genre’s existing tropes seems to indicate that this (welcomely) maligned evolutionary branch of horror may still have far to grow. It’s a jungle out there.

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