Mother of Flies first published by SciFiNow, for its world première Fantasia 2025, 24 July
Mother of Flies opens with graphic if impressionistic images of a corpse, lying on the ground, its bones bared through rotten flesh. “To woo death, one must love it, lie with it,” intones a female voice, as the speaker, legendary local witch Solveig (Toby Poser), writhes naked and bathed in blood atop the body which we can now see is surrounded by other bodies. It is clear that this is some kind of necromantic act, but harder to tell if Solveig is engaged in a magical orgy of sex or of (re)birth. She has, however, already set in motion the ritual which the rest of the film will trace, as the boundaries between life and death are repeatedly transgressed.
Although cinema is a medium which conveys narrative strictly through sight and sound, you can practically smell the death that pervades this latest film from the Adams and Poser family. Whether it is the terminal cancer that is eating away at the ‘barren’ belly of young music student Mickey (Zelda Adams) from the inside and will soon kill her, so that she, thous still living, is already “basically dead”; or the cadavers (animal and human) spread, in varying stages of putrescence, across the floor of the forest that Mickey visits with her father Jake (Zelda’s actual father John Adams); or the flies that constantly swarm around Solveig herself, as though she too has one foot in the grave, and bears on her the stench of decomposition.
The key location of Mother of Flies, apart from the forest itself, is Solveig’s huge old house at its centre, its road entrance marked with a tower of stones known by locals as “the witch’s tit”. It is peculiar abode, both inside and outside, built on and around a giant tree whose overgrown roots, trunk and branches have spread through, even form, the rooms, while its wooden beds have moss or dirt instead of sheets. Indeed it is hard to know just where the house ends and the forest beyond begins – and Solveig’s memories of living there, shown in a series of flashbacks, seem, impossibly, to extend back to a previous century. Time and nature work in mysterious ways here.
Yet when Mickey first arrives at this otherworldy place, she claims to be experiencing “déjà vu” – a sophisticated metacinematic allusion to the Adams-Poser family’s previous The Deeper You Dig (2019) and Hellbender (2021) wherein actual mother and daughter Toby Poser and Zelda Adams similarly played mother-and-daughter witches living off grid together precisely in the Catskills forestland of Upstate New York. Solveig has reached out to Mickey in a most unorthodox way across time and space, and Mickey has answered the call in an act of faith – with her more cynical father in tow at “witch camp” – as a last desperate bid to survive her cancer and to trick the death that is coming.
Yet here, while Solveig is certainly the mother of the title, and a witch, she is not Mickey’s birth mother – a birth mother who, long since deceased, is an aching absence in the film. Maybe, though, Solveig is an echo of that other mother, even as the young girl she nurtures like a daughter will in turn become a mother of sorts. For in these primordial woods, archetypal rôles become fluid, as a complicated element of retroactive surrogacy settles over the proceedings.
A little like Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song (2016), yet spanning a much briefer period of time, Mother of Flies is concerned with a three-day magic ritual supposedly designed to cure Mickey of her cancer where all other, more conventional routes have failed. “I wanna do this, I know it sounds like a scam, I doubt it will even work, but I’ve gotta try,” Mickey insists to her father, adding “she’s doing it for free.” Incredulous, Jake responds: ”Holy mind blown! Are you serious? Nothing is for free – ever!” The film may seem to be about Mickey and the clearly defined if improbable miracle for which she is hoping – but it begins with Solveig, and in a way ends with her too, as her own at first obscure motives gradually come into focus, testing Mickey’s and Jake’s faith to its limits. For destiny has brought together this one-time mother and this sterile daughter, whose complementary, irrationally dovetailing bereftness – respectively for the past and for the future – transcends ages and crosses realms.
The films that the Adams-Poser family make are instantly recognisable as their own. It is not just that John, Toby and their daughters Zelda and Lulu Adams divide between them the duties of writing, directing, shooting and editing, and performing the hard-rocking yet tenderly melancholic scores (via their band H6llb6nd6r), as well of course as playing the lead rôles (look out for Lulu as a friendly motelier) – but also that their films come with considerable thematic cross-talk. At the heart of them all are powerful women not to be underestimated, and staged scenarios in which real parents and their children get to play out – and work through – all the most dysfunctional and disturbing aspects of family life (and its opposite). Full of strange incidents and surrealist imagery, Mother of Flies may be an unsettling work of fiction, but a real family is using all this to process the issues of mortality and eschatology, love and loss which eventually we all must face – but which, healthily, the Adams-Posers face together and turn into cathartic art for themselves and the rest of us.
Mother of Flies is a haunting mystery (in the ancient, cultic sense of that term), beautifully shot amid the cyclical seasons of nature where death and renewal – like poison and cure, or curse and gift – go closely together. For this film’s enchantment to work, all you have to do is believe – or at least suspend disbelief – and the the magic of Solveig’s spell will reveal itself, merging two women’s broken narratives into a perfect exchange across the infinite. At the same time, this digs deep into a long history of puritanical injustice, vicious scapegoating and the persecution of otherness. For it is a vision of an America built on the hateful, hypocritical stones it has cast (against its better nature), and continues casting in what has now become its own unchallenged community ritual. Perhaps the best hope for healing is myth rewritten, family restored – and a mother’s love, no matter how belatedly fulfilled.
strap: Sympathetic magic: the Adams-Poser family’s witchy tale of loss, death and faith healing makes the woods a timeless zone of mystery and miracle
© Anton Bitel
