Mother of Flies (FrightFest 2025)

At the time of writing, it has been a week since I watched Mother of Flies, the latest film from ‘The Adams Family’, a filmmaking troupe composed of Toby Poser, John Adams, and their two daughters, Zelda and Lulu Adams – and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

One of the many joys of the horror genre (and, by that extent, horror festival programming) is how varied and diverse the forms it can take are; attendees at a horror film festival such as FrightFest could find themselves watching a schlocky, goofy crowd-pleaser one moment, and then an hour later be sat down experiencing something far more meditatively discomforting and confrontational. Whereas Mother of Flies is by no means free of gruesome and surreal imagery (it has that in spades), it is decidedly an example of the latter, and is a film which uses its genre elements to address and explore some very difficult and serious topics – ones which the film’s creators have a personal history with.

Mother of Flies is a film about cancer. It’s also a film about witchcraft, the supernatural, and necromancy, but each of those fictional elements superbly compliment the film’s very heavy (and welcomely so) central focus. It isn’t a “simple” film about cancer (if there is such thing as one), either; watching Mother of Flies and listening to the conversations had by the characters therein, it becomes immediately apparent that this film could only have been made by people who have first-hand experiences with the disease, if only for how deeply interesting John, Toby and Zelda’s script is in its unique approach to telling a very grounded and emotionally-driven story about illness and recovery through the lens of supernatural and occult horror. It’s a fascinating film – and quite possibly the best feature offering from FrightFest’s 2025 edition.

Mother of Flies follows Mickey (Zelda Adams), a teenager diagnosed with terminal cancer, who travels with her father, Jake (John Adams), to the remote woodland home of Solveig (Toby Poser), a reclusive ‘witch’, after the doctors give her six months to live. The treatments that Solveig offers to save Mickey’s life are unconventional, and perhaps even dangerous – leading to scepticism from non-believer Jake, who worries that the rituals being performed upon his daughter will hasten her death rather than prevent it. Not all is as it seems, and as with any other form of cancer treatment, the road to recovery will be a difficult and painful one – but why is Solveig so hell-bent on performing painstaking healing rituals for a young girl she has never met, free of charge?

Mother of Flies is, in many ways, a spiritual successor to the Adams Family’s prior witchcraft-centric film Hellbender – and a welcome one too. If Hellbender was proof that Toby, John, and co. understand how to make a strong, compelling work of American folk horror, Mother of Flies solidifies that fact. The film’s depiction of witchcraft is fascinating, blurring the line between medicine and magic in a way which hearkens back to the age-old idea of the witch as a medicine-woman who provides ‘forbidden’ and ‘heretical’ treatments – an idea which carries extra thematic weight in light of the loss of bodily autonomy and the demonisation of doctors that came in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade being overturned in 2022. Solveig’s folk treatments and attempts to ‘trick’ the cancer out of Mickey’s body feel more akin to an arcane equivalent to chemotherapy than they do ‘traditional’ magic – in fact, the approach Mother of Flies takes towards depicting the occult feels so inspired that I’m almost surprised that I haven’t seen a story quite like this told before, let alone as successfully.

It’s also a deeply human and heartfelt film – not least due to the strong performances provided by each of the film’s three leads. Zelda, in particular, delivers a commendable turn as central protagonist Mickey, and Toby Poser manages to play the enigmatic Solveig perfectly, equal parts sinister and sincere. It’s a moving and, at times, unexpectedly wholesome exploration of a father and daughter’s attempt to reckon with one of the most challenging and difficult experiences a human being can face – though that isn’t to say that Mother of Flies doesn’t deliver the grotesque goods. In typical Adams Family fashion (see the aforementioned Hellbender as well as Where the Devil Roams), the slow-burn folksy creepiness and emotional human drama are peppered with morbidly delightful dollops of guts and gore – there are several gruesome images from Mother of Flies that you won’t be able to scrub from your brain, and they’re so gorgeously achieved that I don’t know why you would want to; the film’s opening shot is a thing of bloody, audacious beauty, and has to be seen to be believed.

I’m predisposed to like any film which takes this kind of approach to both horror and human drama, but that won’t stop me from proudly stating that I believe Mother of Flies to be one of this year’s strongest horror films – hell, films in general – so far. Set to hit streaming via Shudder sometime next year, I can’t recommend this enough to anyone who has even a vague interest in checking it out. Needless to say, the Adams Family have done it again.

Robyn’s Archive – Mother of Flies