Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 51 minutes
Stars: Mahershala Ali, John Cho
Writer/Director: Bassam Tariq
In theaters and streaming on Amazon Prime
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
Whether you experience Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother in a theater or at home, set aside a little extra time afterward to just sit there and contemplate this, the most thoughtfully crafted, emotionally absorbing action film since One Battle After Another.
Two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali (Green Book, Moonlight) plays Latif, as flawed a hero as you could imagine: a Houston, Texas hit man who has somehow managed to square his bloody profession with his faith. We first encounter Latif finishing up a messy job in a St. Louis men’s room when he takes a phone call conveying awful but expected news: His wife has just died, shortly after giving birth to the couple’s third child. Now the baby’s digestive system is rejecting formula, and Latif needs to find a source of fresh breast milk.
Rushing back to Texas, Latif is contacted by his frequent employer, a shady Arab businessman (Laith Nakli), who wants him to take out a local militant Christian Nationalist (Star Trek’s John Cho) who he says has, in turn, taken out a contract on the businessman’s nephew (Abubakr Ali), for being a prominent producer of Middle Eastern-centric porn.
All of this sounds like a mayhem-strewn indictment of religious hypocrisy, but while that’s certainly part of the film’s subtext, writer/director Bassam Tariq is after something more profound: an examination of how true, pure faith can endure in a world that too often hijacks religion for its own decidedly carnal ends.
Tariq finds at least some answers in Latif’s devout adolescent children, obviously raised in the Muslim tradition by their mother, who never lose their faith either in God or their well-meaning dad – even when they have to hold him to moral account.
The cast is uniformly outstanding. Ali’s Latif – who rationalizes that he only kills people who deserve it – seems to have an entire holy war raging deep in his breast; his studied, subdued exterior occasionally erupting in a brand of violence that is meticulously targeted, yet somehow out of his control. Cho’s showboating Pastor Hwan at first comes off as too over-the-top – until you remember his bombastic manner is completely in tune with too many YouTube yahoos. A welcome newcomer here is the young actress Adia, who brings layers of seasoned nuance to the role of Latif’s conflicted but devoted older daughter.
Beyond exploring Latif’s strange world of bloody encounters and tender home life, the story often finds its way back to Latif’s mosque, where the elders – including Latif’s stern but understanding father-in-law – patiently try to steer a moral course through a spiritually indifferent and often brutally immoral world.
Miraculously, Tariq navigates these narrative minefields with deft skill, propelling the film to a climax that is somehow thrilling, viscerally violent, and profoundly spiritual.
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