You Are Not My Mother wants to burn slow and make the skin crawl. It does one of those two things… it’s a slow burn. But it didn’t make my skin crawl even though it desperately tried to with its hazy glimpses of weirdness and tension-ramping discordant music. I came away wishing it had lived up to its promise.

The flick is about an Irish teen who has a harried, depressed mom. When mom vanishes one day, the person who returns might not be the same person who left. The film is set it Ireland around Samhain so you can probably imagine what folklore territory this is dancing around a gravestone at midnight about.

I think it’s a good looking movie and the young teen girl has a certain Abigail Breslin vibe to her. But the film seems a little unfocused and unwilling to really go “there” as a horror flick. It’s trying to be just a little too art house when it could use some good old fashioned scares. And what they do show is just a little underwhelming. There’s a lot of time spent focusing on the wrong things and leaving me distracted and a little bored.

Still, not the worst elevated folklore horror film that’s ever been made. It’s tenuously watchable if you have a lot of patience and really get into the vibe they are trying to impart.

Score: 72