This, I must say, is my kind of movie: just things going *awry*, to the most perverse extreme, yet without stretching credulity so far past the point of believability that you can't empathize. Numerous passing notes provide depth, such as a briefly-seen news interview clip showing a parent who has murdered his child, apparently in full command of his faculties, explaining calmly that "I think what's happening is awful" — except, when asked directly, in the case of his child, which, he says with obvious satisfaction, "it was exactly right."
Great horror draws you in with realism and plays on your own comforts and fears, and this conceit, which could so easily have been botched, fully qualifies. It's got the kind of tone and balance to make it a true visceral horror on an emotional, not physical, level, a kind of emotional gore (and, it bears mentioning as an aside, visually it's much less bloody than a movie like this could have been, and shies away from showing gore that most people would have. For instance, one scene is made more disturbing by intimating the presence of the corpse of a child, someone we have seen earlier in the film, by the sound of flies and not actually ever showing it.) This is perhaps a slight disappointment for the modern horror buff, but for me, it's a throwback to a time when horror pictures tried to be well-made movies, not just 90 minutes of visual shock and gore, and aspired to be lean/spare/economical rather than gratuitous. It's the kind of horror that works in broad daylight.
That proper "emotional horror" tone and balance are something very, very few movies pull off right, and I can think of far more failures than successes...the Nicole Kidman vehicle "The Invasion" leaps to mind as an example of this common failure, in how takes one of the creepiest basic tropes in storytelling history and succeeds in somehow divesting it of any sort of gut-level unease for the viewer.
Or perhaps the best opposing example is this film's failed evil twin, "The Happening", with its vaguely similar themes, equally disturbing in concept and even in some passing momentary scenes, and yet, in its entirety, a complete, laughable, abject failure in its execution.
So, with this very well-done buildup, I'd say the first half of this was shaping up to be one of my favorite movies. I generally multitask while I watch movies, but about 15 minutes into this one, I had to put the laptop away so I could watch it with undivided attention, which is about the highest praise I can give the first 15 minutes of a horror movie. The dread nicely escalates, as news reports and background police activity slowly reveal society going off the hinges, finally culminating earlier in the film than expected in a very well-played scene in the delivery room in which mom's sister bears her first child — with results that were played well enough not to be disappointing even though they were entirely predictable. Cinematically, up to that point, it was well done, in the same way that I like about the 2004 remake of "Dawn Of The Dead" —especially the beginning, which it was reminiscent of, in both the early scenes of a forebodingly sterile suburbia, and in the overall "this is never going to be an 'A' horror movie, so let's make it the most solid B+ horror movie we possibly can" quality of the buildup.
Unfortunately, it then sags in the middle, when it stops showing the widespread effects and background of society deteriorating, and shifts entire focus inwards to focus exclusive the main protagonist family, becoming sort of a murderous reverse "Home Alone" where the parents, rather than burglars, are after the kids, resulting in all sorts of around-the-house ingenuity (duct tape is used in two different gimmicks), and never pulls back out to show what's going on in the rest of society again.
It even completely forgets about the sister and baby the movie made us invest emotionally in halfway through with a harrowing delivery room scene, never bothering to return to them — rendering that entire subplot a mere shock device instead of a plot development.
But, oh, on the plus side, did I mention, the parents are Nicholas Cage and Selma Blair? These choice bits of casting really help things along, especially Blair, who is talented enough to glide smoothly from murderous to tender and back again in a heartbeat, telling the kids she's trying to kill that she and their dad love them "more than anything," and making it sound believable.
The overall fun of the picture compensates for its more predictable plot developments, but unfortunately, as the narrative of mounting social unrest-cum-terror of the first half is completely abandoned in exchange for a much narrower survival tale about one pair of kids who weren't really given quite enough background or character development to make us care about them personally, it ceases to live up to its broader potential as a horror yarn. It's the very definition of a seriously flawed gem.
The reviewer on RogerEbert.com got it right when he said, "[the filmmaker] gets so much right here that I can't help but strongly recommend "Mom and Dad" ... with some qualifications." Ultimately, I don't love it. But I know I will watch it again. That's definite.
And, as if I needed one more thing to like about this near-perfect near-miss, it also once again reaffirms my favorite horror movie trope: the key to survival in any horror-movie scenario is outliving Lance Hendrikson. He's *always* the last to go. I think they cast him for that on purpose.
[Note, 2023: Posting this online several years after writing it, I want to add I was sufficiently disturbed by the good parts of this movie that to this day I've resisted watching it again as it's popped back up online. It's not so much that it's a scary movie as it effectively communicates scary concepts that I'm not sure I want to think about: essentially, it asks, what exactly, deep down, is the difference between the instinctual drives of love and rage? Off the top of my head I can't think of a lot of movies that had that kind of effect on me.]
