By George & Josh Bate
Narrative and thematic threads from Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen are brought into the 21st century in Godmother, an Airbnb horror movie that will make you think twice about your next rental (and who you share it with).
Making its world premiere at this year’s Fantastic Fest, Godmother follows Theo (Paige Evans) and Colby (Cameron Cuffe), a couple who embark on a romantic weekend away at a nice home in the New Mexico desert. Colby’s plans to have more intimate one-on-one time with Theo and eventually propose to her are uprooted when Theo’s out-spoken sister Katie (Riley Dandy) crashes the trip. As tensions rise between Colby and Katie, Theo also faces increasingly unsettling behavior from the Martinsons (Dee Wallace and Bruce Davison), the older couple whose rental they are all staying in.
Godmother follows the likes of The Rental and Barbarian in depicting the potential horrors of renting out someone’s home and staying in it for a vacation. Director John Vernon’s feature debut gets extraordinary mileage out of this all-too-relatable premise with a story both familiar and novel.
Employing measured pacing every step of the way, Vernon excels at steadily escalating tension over the course of a first act that operates more like a tense family drama than horror thriller. While the Martinsons, played by horror legends Bruce Davison and Dee Wallace, inject a degree of understated menace into the proceedings, the first half of the film is almost entirely devoid of overt scares or the kind of bizarre shit people come to Fantastic Fest to behold (although, rest assured, all of that arrives in due time).
This tense family drama particularly compels due to its triangulation of fraught relationships. Theo loves her boyfriend Colby, going so far as to tell her sister early on that he may be the one. Colby, meanwhile, has all the trappings of a wholesome boyfriend, although his proclivity for Eric Carmen’s yacht rock should be a bit of a yellow flag.
Their endearing romance faces a very literal obstacle, however, when Katie gatecrashes the trip. While Colby has meticulously planned the getaway and is determined to make everything go perfect, Katie’s free-spirited nature gives way to the exact lack of structure and aimlessness that irks Colby. Cuffe and Dandy play off one another wonderfully, while Evans authentically captures what it’s like to have the two people closest to you in life be at such odds with one another.
But, of course, Godmother is a horror film and, as such, things inevitably take a turn for the worse for our protagonist. In the second half of Vernon’s film, this descent follows a series of revelations, most of which will be of no surprise to anyone with half an eye on the preceding film. Even someone reading a logline for the film would have a fair chance of pinpointing the general direction the story will eventually head in.
Predictability aside, Godmother effectively ramps up both the suspense and strange following these pivots in its narrative. Vernon makes sure to have fun with some of these darker turns, which proves integral to ensuring his film doesn’t devolve into completely bleak territory. Much of this is due to the performance from Cuffe, who deftly nails a particularly detestable form of contemporary toxic masculinity.
While a resemblance to the likes of The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby is glaring, Godmother does just enough with familiar horror tropes to make it stand apart. And, unlike the classic horror flicks from Richard Donner and Roman Polanski, Vernon brilliantly foregoes third arc restraint and offers up some phenomenal horror movie imagery.
VERDICT: 7.5/10
Making its world premiere at this year’s Fantastic Fest, Godmother brings the narrative and thematic threads of Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen into the 21st century with an Airbnb horror story that will you think twice about your next rental accommodation. Initially following Theo and Colby on a planned romantic weekend in the New Mexico desert, the film operates more as a tense family drama than traditional horror flick in its first act as Theo’s sister Katie crashes the trip and clashes with Colby. Director John Vernon employs measured pacing to steadily escalate tension, allowing the fraught relationships between Theo, Colby, and Katie to compellingly drive the first half before the film takes a darker turn through a series of increasingly strange revelations. Although the story is predictable and bears a glaring resemblance to classic horror films, Godmother effectively ramps up the suspense and strange, with Cuffe, Dandy, and Evans delivering performances that bring authenticity and sincerity to the tense family dynamics, even amidst the game-changing reveals. Vernon ultimately makes familiar horror tropes stand apart, especially through some phenomenal horror movie imagery in the film’s final act, and crafts a taut indie film that suggests a promising career in genre fare is ahead for the debut filmmaker.