Mom and Dad (2017) - Review

Mom and Dad throws you into the life of the "average" suburban family: a dispassionate middle-aged father, Brent Ryan (Cage), a mother, Kendall, who wants to find her purpose in life after her children seem old enough to take care of themselves (Selma Blair), Carly, a rebellious teenage daughter (Anne Winters), and Joshua, a seemingly normal nine year old boy. Everyone seems to have their fair share of issues with one another, Brent and Kendall are in a dysfunctional marriage and hide that, or attempt to try, from their children. Brent is in the middle of his mid-life crisis with no end in sight when a parent- child rampage sweeps across the nation. Carly and her boyfriend Damon fend off the Ryan parents while protecting the young Joshua from harm's way.

There is something refreshing about never knowing what the origin of the murderous impulses plaguing the parents in the movie. All too often, movies try extremely hard to give the viewer every bit of information possible so that the confusion is brought to a minimum. The movie also gives an outlet for Cage to give the audience what they have come to expect from him over the years: his own brand of unhinged animalism that he has perfected. From the beginning of the movie, I abandoned all pretense of judging the persuasiveness of performances, but as the children mount their defense to match the intensity of their parents, it became clear that Anne Winters's Carly and Zachary Arthur's Joshua shine for their sanity in the face of parental insanity. 

Mom and Dad stays strong by focusing on a small cast of characters for the meat of the film, using the larger cast to set the stakes for the frenzied actions of Cage and Blair. It also seems to be a form of twisted wish fulfillment, from both the parent's and child's perspectives: The parents finally get a chance to act on their dark desires, regretting to have had kids in the first place and having an opportunity to correct that - while the children are finally able to defend themselves against all of the "injustices" in their lives as one is being perpetrated against them. I enjoyed the movie overall, but I'm not sure about how long it will take before coming back. I'll never outright knock a movie because of its gore, if it is thematically coherent I will judge it in that manner, but it does play into my decision to watch it anytime soon.