With Mother of Flies, indie horror auteurs The Adams Family once again prove that no one else is operating on quite their cinematic wavelength. Like their previous works, this is a film less concerned with clean narrative mechanics than it is with mood, texture, and emotional rot. It’s a folk horror lament soaked in blood, grief, and the inescapable cruelty of the human body failing the people who love it most. It’s bleak, nasty, and undeniably beautiful in equal measure.
Check out our review of their 2022 hit 'HELLBENDER'
The film centers on Mickey (Zelda Adams), a young woman suffering from a life-ending illness that modern medicine has both failed and been priced out of reach. Her father Jake (John Adams), quietly wracked with guilt, anger, and helplessness, watches as every possible option evaporates. In desperation, Mickey turns to dark magic - not out of curiosity or thrill-seeking, but because there is simply nowhere else left to go. In a world where healthcare is a luxury and hope is conditional, witchcraft becomes less a transgression and more a last resort.
Mother of Flies opens with a startling, blood-soaked sequence that immediately announces its intentions. It’s confrontational, grotesque, and visually arresting. The director triangle of Toby Poser and John & Zelda Adams present necrophilic imagery not for shock alone, but as a grim invocation of death’s intimacy. From that moment on, the Adamses’ signature command of imagery takes hold. Every frame feels deliberate, sculpted, and dripping with thematic intent.
One early scene in a diner is especially telling: Mickey and Jake sit beneath an overwhelming display of American flags as they discuss their inability to afford her treatments. It’s a quietly devastating image - patriotism looming large over a system that has abandoned them entirely. This is folk horror rooted not just in the forest, but in modern despair, where economic cruelty can be seen as just as monstrous as any supernatural force.
As expected from these filmmakers, nature becomes a central character once again. The forest is a familiar space in the Adams Family’s work, and it’s shot here with both reverence and dread. The sound design constantly foregrounds the natural world - leaves rustling, water running, birds calling out- creating an atmosphere that feels alive and watchful. When Mickey and Jake drive into the woods to meet Solveig (Poser), the witch who promises a cure, it feels less like a journey into evil than a surrender to something ancient and indifferent.
Solveig is a haunting creation. As a seemingly undead, poetic presence with a voice that drifts in and out of the film like a mournful incantation, she frames her unorthodox healing methods as no different from radiation or chemotherapy. Both are violent, painful, and cruel, but sometimes the only tools available. “You accepted a vicious cure, and it failed,” she tells Mickey, drawing a devastating parallel between magic and medicine. Healing, the film suggests, has always demanded suffering.
Jake’s arc is especially potent. While Mickey seeks a cure for her illness, her father is quietly in need of healing himself. When he begrudgingly partakes in Solveig’s concoctions, the results are predictably horrific, culminating in an unforgettable, gag-worthy sequence of sickness that ranks among the Adams Family’s most viscerally disgusting onscreen moments. These artists never shy away from gore, and when it comes, it’s nasty, squelching, and deeply unpleasant in the best way possible.
Yet for all its grotesque beauty, Mother of Flies is ultimately about emotional honesty. In a late, devastating exchange, father and daughter finally confront the reality they’ve both been avoiding, and their shared failure to cope with it. It’s raw, messy, and painfully human, grounding the film’s more abstract horrors in something achingly real.
Music once again plays a crucial role in this project. The Adams Family’s band H6LLB6ND6R echo the film’s themes with deep, booming bass and brutal clarity. Sound and image fuse into a singular sensory experience, one that evokes just the right kind of atmosphere to back up the film’s haunting visuals.
Like their previous film Where the Devil Roams, Mother of Flies ends up saying more with a fraction of the resources most films are afforded. It’s a reminder that authenticity, vision, and emotional commitment matter far more than big-budget polish or scale. This is atmosphere-driven horror at its finest. It’s a film that prioritizes tone, feeling, and sincerity over conventional storytelling.
It’s pretty fucked up, all things considered, and I do mean that in the most complimentary sense possible. Mother of Flies is another singular entry in the Adams Family’s growing body of work. A folk horror elegy for the sick, the grieving, and the desperate, it’s a film that understands healing as something violent, uncertain, and rarely clean.
'Mother of Flies' is now streaming on AMC+.
