The Voices of Our Mother: Sheila McCarthy Possesses the Screen in Unprepossessing Demonic Fable

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

Demons — you can’t live with them, and you can’t make supernatural possession movies without them.

Though these supernatural agents of Satan are enjoying a vogue among right-wing American political figures (JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, Mike Johnson), they’re ancient news, especially in the horror movie business.

The spritely, resourceful Canadian actor Sheila McCarthy is easily the most entertaining element in The Voices of Our Mother, the sophomore feature film from writer-director, Mark O’Brien (2021’s The Righteous).

McCarthy plays Harriet Scaflan, a 75-year-old mother of four adult children who comes down with a bad case of demonic possession, which initially looks like dementia. Bruised and spattered, she cowers and whimpers like a frightened child, mocks her adult children, leaps out a second-story window, dislocates her jaw sideways, and smacks and screams blasphemies at a priest.

Although her character stops short of spinning her head 360 degrees and levitating like Linda Blair in The Exorcist — and it’s not particularly scary — there’s at least a tingle of suspense in waiting to see what she’s going to do next.

A hybrid of horror and dysfunctional family drama, The Voices of Our Mother encourages interpretation as an allegory of adult children’s struggle to grieve abusive religious parents. But although the film’s execution is solidly professional with assured lighting, camerawork, acting, and practical effects, the story bogs down in an implausible script, fragmentary edits, and exposition dumps of Catholic-flavoured theology. Evil, it turns out, begets evil. But love may find a way.

Near the film’s beginning, four estranged adult siblings convene at a dreary hospital where their mother Harriet has been admitted with a suspected stroke, following the death of her mother, the 95-year-old Johanna (Anna Ferguson).

Despite peculiarities in the lab work, Harriet’s doctor (Lanette Ware) concludes that she has nothing seriously wrong with her and sends her home with the four children, all of whom share memories of their father’s violent abuse and mother’s passivity.

William (played by writer-director O’Brien) is an arrogant college professor with a history of compulsive gambling. His twin sister Theresa (Carolina Bartczak) is a freeloader who spends all her money on therapeutic retreats and bears a longtime grudge against William.

Younger brother Martin (Alex Ozerov-Meyer) is an easily manipulated weakling and drug abuser. Annika (Georgina Reilly) is a convent-bound nun who has a foreshadowing nightmare that opens the film. Rounding out the cast is Father Roslovic (Shawn Doyle), a priest who has known Harriet and her mom as daily churchgoers for decades and is alarmed by the recent change in Harriet.

Priest and family both conclude that Harriet has not had a psychotic break but is demonically possessed, though Harriet, or whoever is talking from inside her, resents label. “There is no possession here, Father,” she barks at the priest. “Only suppression by God!”

As watchable as McCarthy’s performance is — sometimes it’s almost enough just to watch a resourceful actor work hard — the backstory never quite makes sense before the splashy climax leads to the quick resolution.

The Voices of Our Mother might have benefited from amplifying the humour which underlies several scenes of the squabbling siblings.

Too often, the film feels locked into familiar horror tropes as the musical score churns ominously (can we retire the kettle whistle effect?) and editing that shuffles through distracting clusters of imagery including religious figurines and statues, the gargoyle atop the spire on Father Roslovic’s church and, for some reason, microscopic images of coloured cells heaving about, as if demons are viruses.

That’s close to a belief that American conspiracy freaks have already embraced.

The problem here is not that supernatural forces aren’t good surrogates for terrible parenting (you don’t have to believe in ghosts to appreciate Hamlet) but that the agents of evil should behave coherently, if not in a family-friendly way.

The Voices of Our Mother. Written and directed by Mark O’Brien. Starring Sheila McCarthy, Mark O’Brien, Georgina Reilly, Carolina Bartczak, Alex Ozerov-Meyer and Shawn Doyle. Now available on video on demand including Google, YouTube and Apple TV.