An Uneasy Matriarchal Nightmare

MOVIE REVIEW
The Voices of Our Mother
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Genre: Horror, Supernatural
Year Released: Shudder, 2026
Runtime: 1h 33m
Director(s): Mark O’Brien
Writer(s): Mark O’Brien
Cast: Sheila McCarthy, Georgina Reilly, Mark O’Brien, Carolina Bartczak, Alex Ozerov-Meyer, Anna Ferguson
Where to Watch: available to stream on Shudder June 19, 2026

RAVING REVIEW: THE VOICES OF OUR MOTHER understands that horror is more volatile than a family home after a medical emergency. A parent’s decline has a way of dragging old roles back into place, forcing adult children to become caretakers, witnesses, rivals, and frightened kids again, sometimes within the same window in time. Writer/director Mark O’Brien’s supernatural horror film uses that pressure as its foundation, then turns it into something darker. The house doesn’t just hold memories. It holds an accusation. It holds an obligation. It holds the kind of resentment that can outlast the people who caused it.

Harriet Scaflen’s sudden health crisis brings her four estranged children home after the death of her own mother, and that gives the film an immediate sense of discomfort before anything overtly supernatural takes over. These characters don’t arrive as a united front. They arrive with history. Some of it is spoken, some of it is implied, and some of it comes out through the kind of family exchanges where every line seems to carry older arguments underneath it. O’Brien doesn’t rush to make the siblings likable, and that honesty is why it's so relatable; we all have a family member who pushes their luck to varying degrees. THE VOICES OF OUR MOTHER works because the family already feels damaged enough to haunt itself.

Sheila McCarthy’s portrayal as Harriet is a performance that requires physical vulnerability, emotional threat, maternal intimacy, and something much colder beneath it all. McCarthy is especially effective because she doesn’t portray Harriet as a possession or a helpless victim. Even when the film pushes into more traditional supernatural territory, there’s a troubling ambiguity to the character. Is evil using Harriet, or is it finding a shape inside pain that already existed?

The sibling dynamic is where the movie gets most of its unease. Georgina Reilly, Mark O’Brien, Carolina Bartczak, and Alex Ozerov-Meyer bring distinct shades of fatigue, anger, avoidance, and defensiveness to the family. The film is smart enough to recognize that estrangement rarely stems from a single incident. It’s usually built over years of small failures, mismatched memories, silence, favoritism, fear, and survival habits no one wants to name. When the supernatural threat presses against them, it doesn’t feel random. It feels like an escalation of what was already in the room.

This isn’t just a horror movie about an elderly matriarch becoming threatening. It’s about the violence of inheritance, the way family pain can move from one generation to the next until no one knows where the original wound ends and their own choices begin. O’Brien links illness, grief, faith, resentment, and punishment into a story where survival itself becomes morally complicated. Harriet’s body becomes a battleground, but so does the family’s shared memory. Everyone seems to be carrying a version of the truth, and none of them is harmless.

THE VOICES OF OUR MOTHER uses faith as both comfort and a weapon, which makes sense within a story so tied to guilt, endurance, and the idea of suffering as something that can be justified after the fact. At its best, the film treats religious language as part of the family’s issue rather than decoration. At its weaker points, it pushes toward familiar possession-film territory, leaning into recognizable imagery and ominous spiritual framing when the more grounded emotional horror is already doing stronger work.

The film also asks the audience to sit with an uncomfortable view of abuse, forgiveness, and obligation, and that will likely be the most divisive part of the experience. THE VOICES OF OUR MOTHER doesn’t offer just an empowerment story where everyone sees the damage, escapes the house, and walks away. It’s harsher than that, and at times more troubling. The film is wrestling with cycles of harm, but there are moments when its spiritual and emotional conclusions risk feeling muddy. That murkiness is partly intentional, because the story wants to sit inside contradiction.

There’s a real confidence in the way O’Brien stages the collapse. Coming after THE RIGHTEOUS, this feels like another example of his interest in horror rooted in guilt, belief, and moral corrosion. He’s not chasing empty genre cliches here (for the most part). Even when THE VOICES OF OUR MOTHER uses familiar tropes, it's still the psychological and family trauma that does the most to the larger story. It wants to know what happens when the person who gave you life becomes what you fear, and what happens when love is tangled with the need to escape.

The film’s best moments linger because they don’t separate the supernatural from the emotional. Harriet’s condition is frightening, but the more disturbing idea is that the evil inside the house understands the family because the family has been feeding it for years. That gives THE VOICES OF OUR MOTHER a bitter aftertaste that works well for an intimate, character-driven horror. This is a tense, bruising supernatural horror film that treats family not as a safe place invaded by evil, but as the place evil may have learned to speak in the first place.

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[photo courtesy of SHUDDER, VORTEX PRODUCTIONS]

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