Mother and Me world première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026
“I just made it into art,” says teenaged Casey Spencer (Caylee Cowan) near the end of Mother and Me – and while it would be a spoiler too far to provide the the precise context of that line here, it is broadly true that Carson McKinnon’s debut feature is concerned with the making of an artist, and to a degree with its own making too.
As a little girl, when her father Robert (Derek Boone), a celebrated author of genre fiction, was still alive, Casey dreamt of being a ballerina – but in her adolescence she has become more interested in painting and illustration, and has a real talent for it. Yet her mother Janelle (Tara Janae Smith) wants her not only to follow in her late father’s literary footsteps, but also to write novels very similar to the ones that made Robert so successful, forging a family tradition that Robert’s book agent (Paul Cartwright) suggests would be a highly saleable gimmick. To Janelle, Casey is more cash cow than daughter.
Not only does Casey struggle with writing, telling Janelle, “This doesn’t really come naturally to me”, but she also has a highly toxic relationship with her mother. Janelle is a monster of violently swinging moods – a controlling, abusive alcoholic who keeps Casey a virtual prisoner at home, places a lock and chain on the kitchen fridge, and makes the provision of basic food contingent on Casey’s daily production of manuscript pages in sufficient numbers. Maternity does not come naturally to Janelle either, making Casey a slave to her mother’s arbitrary demands and whims – and in this hermetic crucible of crazed cruelty, an artistic sensibility is being born, even if Casey must truly starve for her art.
When local boy Steven (Brady Noon) befriends Casey, he shows her a glimpse of a world beyond the confines of her own, where people can pursue their own interests and where Casey feels appreciated, even loved, for who she is, rather than for who her father was or who her mother wants her to be. Where Casey is never allowed to listen to modern music at home, and has no choice but to write her pages on an old typewriter because Janelle does not like computers (and wants to preclude any contact with the outside), Steven himself chooses to listen to music on outmoded vinyl and cassette tapes, even though the film expressly unfolds in a post-9/11 era (not that Casey has ever heard of 9/11), and a hidden smartphone plays a key part in events.
In other words, where for Steven the past is merely a playground of quirky nostalgia from which he can freely pick and choose, Casey has become trapped in the past and is expected in her work to reproduce and repeat it endlessly. Like any artist, Casey draws on what she knows, and given the narrowness of her horizons, this means that her horror writing, painting and sculpting all inevitably fall under her mother’s baleful influence. Although Janelle is hardly a reflective person, she does recognise herself in Casey’s sketches of a woman empty and literally heartless, and in Casey’s manuscript of a traumatic upbringing, and Janelle responds to these negative representations with an anger and violence that only prove the accuracy of Casey’s portraiture.
Drawing on the bad mothers from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976), Frank Perry’s Mommie Dearest (1981), Jeffrey Bloom’s Flowers in the Attic (1987), Lucky McKee’s May (2002) and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), McKinnon tracks an artist seeking both self-expression and horror, and a film in search of its form. Even though Casey can never escape her family, she does in the end find, however briefly, her own voice across multiple media – although, in a final irony, even her own voice will turn out also to be McKinnon’s, appropriated by him much as Casey herself is expected to assume and articulate the voice of her father. After all, it takes more than one person to mother art.
strap: Carson McKinnon’s debut feature traps a teen artist under the baleful influence of an abusive, controlling matriarch
© Anton Bitel
