Review: ‘Mother of Flies’
2025 / Dir. John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser
☆ 4/5
Watch if you like: The Witch, The Blair Witch Project, other movies with witches in the woods, and having a surgical procedure performed with a spiky twig.
Mickey (Zelda Adams in her best performance to date) is a young woman dying of cancer, embarking with her skeptical father (John Adams) to the woodland home of the mysterious Solveig (Toby Poser), who promises she can cure her cancer in just three days. If you’re not familiar with the other Adams family (only one “D”), they’re an actual family that makes folk horror movies together and do basically everything: write, act, direct, edit, etc. This is their most accomplished film to date, full of gorgeous, eerie visuals from the remarkable wood cabin they stay in to the truly ghastly ending that I won’t spoil. Mother of Flies is more focused on a dark, poetic tone than traditional scares—more A24 than Blumhouse—with its own cinematic language offering a unique dialect of contemporary horror.