by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Kate Logan, Juliette Greenfield, Andy Sparnon
Intro:
… a quick and dirty thriller that excels at atmosphere and instilling real anxiety in its audience …
“We love our bread, we love our butter, but most of all, we love our horror.”
This is the mission statement of Aussie studio Duckpond Productions, and over the last few years, director/writer/producer/editor Jayden Creighton has been plying his trade with a series of pulpy horror shorts and a somewhat interesting vigilante web series in Riot Girl. Nothing all that amazing, but serviceable for those with a taste for the classics (and a willingness to play along with genre cliches). But with his first step into feature-length territory, things have turned out a bit different. And a whole lot better.
The Matriarch’s main premise of a drug-addicted mother (Kate Logan) viciously hunting down her own daughter (Juliette Greenfield) is standard domestic thriller material with a little dose of psycho-biddy. However, despite its short-sized conceit, Creighton makes the most out of the extended runtime as, rather than just reiterate the expected beats, he gives them room to breathe, expand, and in turn, become scary.
The way that the film incorporates gendered violence into its narrative feels cut from the same cloth as slyly feminist works like Black Christmas (the original, not the OTT remakes), examining the damage done by the mindset that women need to have men around, even if they are directly responsible for harm. Andy Sparnon (a doppelganger for Christiaan Van Vuuren) as the mum’s straight-out-of-prison boyfriend, isn’t in much of the film proper, but his presence as a lingering reminder of trauma only adds to the immense dread that pushes both main characters into their current predicament.
At a lean-and-mean 82 minutes, the film mainly consists of the cat-and-mouse game between mother and daughter, and it is tense throughout. Matt Martin’s grim cinematography and Michael Drew’s sometimes-gentle-but-mostly-nervy soundtrack really bring the grit out of the rural domestic setting, while Logan and Greenfield are both superb. Logan’s bestial turn is both terrifying and, as the true extent of her damage gets laid out, oddly sympathetic. To say nothing of first-timer Greenfield, who is a bit stiff early on but goes on to excel both as the target and as the quick-thinking retributor. We’re not saying that there needs to be an Aussie remake of Becky, but we might have found our perfect casting pick if that should occur.
The Matriarch is a quick and dirty thriller that excels at atmosphere and instilling real anxiety in its audience from the jump, delivering a compelling and scary story.
