Movie Review: The Good Mother

 

Michael's Movie Grade: C+

A good enough thriller. 

As a standard thriller, there is quite a bit to like here. The lead characters (while far from complex) are easy to relate to and care about. Even though most of us have not gone through anything like these characters, it is hard not to feel some emotional connection to them and simply have empathy for everything they go through. The fact that these characters are played by Hillary Swank and Olivia Cooke makes the characters compelling to an extent (that is just good enough), as they bring much humanity to these rather simplistic characters. Many of the suspense scenes here are very well directed by Miles Joris-Peyrafitte. He gives this film a real stylistic feel and the pacing and staging on each suspense scene is wonderful. 

There is nothing really fundamentally wrong with this film, as it is very competently made. However, I was unable to watch any of it without thinking, "this should be so much better." The movie seems content to be just a standard thriller without any attempt to dig deeper. The movie keeps bringing up really interesting ideas but never expanding on them. This can often leave us with a very unsatisfied feeling. The idea of a mother and daughter in law that don't have a great relationship working together to investigate the death of one's son and the other's husband, should bring us a very interesting dynamic between the two. The idea of a great dynamic is brought up at the start but dropped soon afterwards when the two become best friends. The idea of how an addict's addiction to drugs affects his family provides an opportunity to provide some deep commentary, but instead this simply is soon put in the back seat to a standard thriller. Even the big reveal feels incredibly undeveloped and feels like a missed opportunity. All this can easily make you easily feel underwhelmed. 

This is not a bad movie by any means and is engaging enough to be glad you saw it. However it is hard to watch this without thinking about how much better it should have been.