MOTHER (2006) – Michael P. DiPaolo.

Oedipus Hex!!!!

A bleak, nightmarishly doom-centric B/W excursion into unchecked, escalating insanity, oppressively set within an isolated farmhouse, taking grisly inspiration from the hateful crimes of iconic cannibal freak Ed Gein. Sans dialogue, Mother is a nihilistic mood piece, glumly presenting an entirely distasteful milieu with a bravura lack of empathy for the viewer's sensibilities. Much like reading the unexpurgated journals of a prisoner tortured to death in a Soviet Gulag, Mother is a glacial, pitiless, top-to-bloody-bottom black acid downer! Absolutely suffused in cruelty, and runaway morbid psychopathy, with a dissonant sound design, and lurid depictions of aberrant human behaviour, DiPaolo's Mother is an unflinchingly gross dissection of a malign matriarch, and the perverse peccadilloes of her no less repellent progeny.

To the director's great credit, from the depressive opening, right until its macabre conclusion, the film's desolated tone is monochromatically maintained throughout. One of my all-time favourite scenes of cinematic horror is the truly grotesque deathbed feed in Deranged, which gets a muted reference here. I believe it's my obsession with Deranged which ultimately endeared me to Mother's stifling melancholia, monomaniacal misanthropy, and sordid digressions in necromantic ideation. Michael P. DiPaolo operates in the same negatively compulsive space as Grief's Miserably Ever After album,it ain't fucking pretty, the anguish never stops, and even in death, the ravening conqueror worm, perpetuates our miseries forever more. Depending on your world view, Mother is the best Christmas movie no one ever talks about!! While Cronenberg proposed the equalitarian maxim that 'all flesh is erotic flesh', the invidious machinations of terror tubby here powerfully suggests otherwise!