By Michael Marano

The Front Room lacks the suspense and tension of My Mother the Car and, on top of that, it doesn’t have the benefit of a super-catchy theme song.

The Front Room, directed by Sam Eggers and Max Eggers. Screening at Coolidge Corner Theatre, Landmark Kendall Square Cinema, AMC Boston Common 19, and other movie houses around New England.

A scene featuring Brandy in The Front Room. Photo: A24

I’m not good at coming up with portmanteaus, and avoid doing so.

But The Front Room necessitates me running this portmanteau up the flagpole… “Freppo Baby.”

Salute it, or don’t.

But bear with me, because right now I gotta use it.

“Freppo Baby,” as in “Fraternal Neppo Baby,” refers to the trend for not-as-talented brothers of established stars to get plum jobs they otherwise couldn’t get. It’s the trend that gave us Jerry Van Dyke in My Mother the Car and more Baldwins than a dog has fleas. (Jim Belushi was too damned good in Twin Peaks: the Return to still be saddled with that epithet. Same with Joel Murray, brother of Bill, on Mad Men. And there’s no way the term ever applied to Joaquin Phoenix.)

The Front Room, released by A24, is based on a short story by The Woman in Black author Susan Hill, adapted by and directed by Max and Sam Eggers. Max and Sam are the kid brothers of director Robert Eggers, who made The Witch and The Light House, two movies that helped define the subgenre that’s come to be known as “A24 Horror” or, God Help Us, “elevated horror.”

The Front Room is a garbled mess… very much a companion piece to My Mother the Car, in that it’s a Freppo Baby product involving the attempt to cope with an overbearing maternal figure not fully in this world, and who’s unwilling to leave it.

It lacks the suspense and tension of My Mother the Car, and unlike My Mother the Car, doesn’t have the benefit of a super-catchy theme song.

Brandy (the definitive Cinderella to multiple generations at this point) plays a young, expecting anthropologist who must take in the wicked step-mother of her public defender hubby (played as an absolute weenbag by Andrew Burnap, soon to be another Disney princess’ boyfriend in Marc Webb’s live-action Snow White). Kathryn Hunter, who portrayed all three witches while pulling off some freaky contortionism in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of MacBeth, steals the movie as Solange, the wicked step-mother. Solange is a mad scientist gene-splice of Gollum and every crazy old biddy from every “Hagsploitation” movie made in the wake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? She’s a hyper-religious, racist, card-carrying Daughter of the Confederacy and, I have no idea if this is intentional or not, but she looks and speaks just like the evil matriarch from the delightfully sleazy 1980 slasher movie Mother’s Day… which is a good Freppo Baby project from Troma, written and directed by Charles Kaufman, brother of Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman.

Burnap’s character is named Norman, and there is a certain joy to hear an overbearing, corpse-like mother figure surrounded by 19th century furnishings shrieking “NORMAN!” to a dodgeball victim of a young man the way Mrs. Bates did in Psycho. But that joy only serves to throw the drudgery of The Front Room into higher relief and to make this reviewer, at least, want to summon an Uber home and watch old episodes of Bates Motel.

Solange has a squirrel’s nest of freaky religious beliefs in her squishy noggin, and thinks the Holy Spirit moves through her as she speaks in tongues the way people at tent revivals did in the documentary Marjoe. One of the greatest idiocies of The Front Room is that if anybody can deal with an Elmer Gantry reject like that, it’s an anthropologist, especially one who specializes in religious ideologies, the way Brandy’s character supposedly does.

Solange is a master manipulator, and Hunter’s performance is extraordinary. Having lived in the Carolinas, I can tell you firsthand that she perfectly captures the “What? Who, Me? But I’m Sweet As Sugar!” look of a racist, older southern woman who has let slip a “not-so-micro” aggression and knows it.

The great problem with The Front Room is that it does not focus on Solange’s manipulation and evil heart as much as it does on Solange’s incontinence. Yeah, a lot can be done with Cinderella thanklessly cleaning up her step-mom-in-law’s literal piss and shit. But the fact is, millions of people are dealing with the incontinence of older relatives. I guarantee you, someone on your block is doing just that as you read this review. If you’re going to make the very real plight of a significant percentage of the population an object of abject horror, you need to invest that plight with more than just the difficulty of that plight in and of itself. I personally know someone whose abusive parents weaponized their incontinence against a caretaker child they wanted to break — and you can infer this is what Solange is doing. But the younger Eggers brothers don’t have the storytelling or directorial chops to communicate that in a way that carries the movie.

How crappy are their storytelling chops?

Right after the screening, I was talking to a few colleagues. None of us could define which moment in The Front Room was the climax, the turning point to which the narrative built so that it could take a new turn. There was no escalation. No building tension. Just one shot of a befouled adult diaper after the other. There were several moments that could have been turning points, but the plot did not turn on them. The Eggers Freppo Babies punted on second down each time they got the ball. Every narrative note and emotional beat in The Front Room could have been hit, and hit much better, in 30 blissfully sweet and fleeting minutes on an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Ultimately, the main failure of The Front Room is one of abdication. There is a very real socio-political reality to Solange’s twisted beliefs, and rather than address them in a meaningful way, the younger Eggers brothers choose to focus on gross things swirling down toilets.

Novelist, writing instructor, editor and personal trainer Michael Marano ( www.BluePencilMike.com ) wishes he could come up with a portmanteau one-tenth as good as “Hagsploitation.”