‘Mother Of Flies’ review: Fantasia’s Cheval Noir winner is a visceral, thoughtful folk horror

Dir/scr: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser. US. 2025. 92mins.

“The drugs is bitter however the treatment is good,” guarantees Solveig the witch in Mom Of Flies – and she or he will not be exaggerating. The most recent, hand-crafted providing from cult favourites the Adams Household (John Adams, his spouse Toby Poser and their daughter Zelda Adams) is a considerate fusion of Cronenbergian physique horror and the supernatural that builds into one among their most completed movies so far.

Retains plausibility whereas steadily revealing its truths

A win for greatest movie in Fantasia’s Cheval Noir competitors ought to commend it to style followers, and demanding assist might assist nudge the potential viewers past Adams Household diehards. Shudder has acquired a choice of rights, together with North America and the UK, with a streaming launch deliberate for 2026.

The filmmaking household (The place The Satan Roams, Hell Gap and many others) describe Mom Of Flies as “our fairytale manipulation of the darkly shadowed, but love-lined pathways between a human life and dying”. Impressed by their very own experiences of sickness, it focuses on faculty scholar Mickey (Zelda Adams) whose most cancers has returned. The medical doctors recommend she has, at greatest, six months to dwell. Clutching any chance of reprieve, Mickey makes contact with Solveig (Poser), a mysterious religious healer with an acute understanding of the circle of life, dying and rebirth. Accompanied by her sceptical father Jake (John Adams), Mickey heads deep into the woods for a three-day retreat with Solveig.

The Adams clan make professional use of spectacular places within the Catskill mountain forests of New York State. Solveig’s huge wood home-cum-lair belongs in a Grimms’ fairytale, and seems to have grown immediately out of the timber and soil. The photographs of tumbling waterfalls, lush vegetation, wildlife all assist to make nature and the altering seasons a part of the life Solveig has endured. The risks are signalled by sharp thorns, thistles, unfamiliar fungi, doubtful potions and spells that would ship hurt or salvation. 

The filmmakers take their time to ascertain the ambiance and ease the viewer right into a story that retains plausibility whereas steadily revealing its truths. The sound design is especially persuasive, surrounded by the thrill of flies, the chirp of crickets, gusts of wind and the eerie silences in woods which have stood for hundreds of years. En route to fulfill Solveig, Mickey and Jake appear to depart behind numerous indicators of the trendy world, from an all-American diner to a motel and the freeway. The woods are removed from the certainties of civilisation, revealing their connections with dying and decay by rotting animal corpses and maggots to slithering serpents.

Toby Poser’s Solveig is a suitably regal determine as she presides over this kingdom, providing her vicious cures and a extremely private model of religion. A combination of healer and witch, necromancer and comforter, she reveals the ideas that swirl round her head in intensive voiceover narration spoken in rhyming couplets.

Maybe inevitably, Mom Of Flies will increase the blood, viscera and trauma in its second half. One encounter between Jake and lodge receptionist Ruthie (Lulu Adams) supplies quite a handy quantity of exposition, and the Adams are nonetheless a little bit too keen on blunt close-ups in overlaying some key conversations, But in addition they present a great deal of maturity right here, placing their religion in restraint and the standard of the storytelling. Even the Adams collective H6llb6nd6r is extra subdued within the musical rating it supplies, including to the sense of unease quite than going full throttle. The result’s a sophisticated horror yarn that results in a satisfying conclusion, and leaves the impression there’s greater than sufficient materials right here for a possible prequel or an extension of Solveig’s story.