The Front Room review – a strangely scatalogical chamber piece

Kathryn Hunter has been one of theatre’s strangest, most versatile gems for over three decades now, and to see her perform on stage is to witness a true chameleon of an actor. Her lined, expressive face, darting black eyes and tiny frame have enabled her to sculpt her body into any character – she’s been Puck, Cleopatra, and was the first woman ever to play King Lear professionally. Although she’s made a few film appearances over the years, it wasn’t until Hunter appeared in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (as all three witches) that she began to book arthouse cameos in earnest – the fact it took this long is a crying shame.

The Front Room brings her biggest film role to date, and Hunter – armed with a Kentucky fried accent so swampy every second sentence is almost incomprehensible – plays Solange, the wizened, Bible-bashing stepmother of meek public defender Norman (Andrew Burnap). After the death of Norman’s father, Solange swiftly moves into his home, leveraging her hefty inheritance and frail nature against Norman and his good-natured, heavily pregnant wife Belinda (Brandy). The Front Room doesn’t wait long to reveal the obvious: Solange is a biddy powered exclusively by racism, God’s love and collard greens, with a lifetime membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

It’s immediately clear why Hunter was drawn to The Front Room; adapted from Susan Hill’s short story, it’s a surprisingly grounded chamber piece that requires extraordinary physicality from the actor. The marketing teased something in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby but directors the Eggers Brothers (brothers to Robert, making their feature debut here) are, in fact, oddly content to stage The Front Room as more of a dark-sided drama than an out-and-out horror. It’s all very stagey and Hunter, incapable of giving a dud performance, effortlessly sells Solange as a tack-sharp old woman who may have sinister designs for her incoming step-grandchild.

Hunter was excellent in The Tragedy of Macbeth and memorably weird as Poor Things’ brothel madam but The Front Room is the first screen role where she’s been allowed to really flex her skillset as an actor. Her Solange is a nasty little goblin of a woman, hunched and shrill and physically aided by two large canes that give her a mantis-like silhouette. The Front Room never quite edges towards the Grand Guignol histrionics you might expect from the concept but the physicality of the role is what’s most impressive – it’s not an easy performance in the slightest.

In the other corner of the ring is Brandy, making her very welcome return to horror some 26 years after she stole the show in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. As Belinda is a woman at the end of her tether – she’s undervalued at work, unsupported by Norman, tasked with handling Solange and masking her frustration with patient smiles, all while in her third trimester – The Front Room mostly relies on the injustice of her situation as well as Brandy’s innate charm. It’s perhaps not the most rewarding role in the world, particularly opposite Hunter’s God-fearing villainess, but we can hope that this paves the way for a Brandy renaissance.

But it’s worth mentioning the pissing and shitting. When you suspect the Eggers Brothers might shift The Front Room into a more complex psychological key, it resolves to just have Solange pee and poo everywhere. I cannot overstate how often this happens. If there was any doubt that hagsploitation is back (indeed, there is one scene where a heavily made-up Hunter looks uncannily like Bald Demi Moore in The Substance), The Front Room is here to mark its stinky territory. This is a little bit bananas as a creative choice, but unfortunately very effective because it’s viscerally gross and it absolutely wouldn’t work without Hunter, who breathes far more life and motivation into Solange than the script does. Despite appearing cartoonishly feeble, Solange is clearly still in full possession of her faculties, always with a cunning glint in her eye, and so she uses her body as a weapon against Norman and Belinda.

If you’re able to make peace with the faecal smears on the wall painted by a cackling Olivier winner known for her physical performances, The Front Room is an entertaining, morbidly funny slice of perverse B-movie exploitation horror. In the best way, it feels like something Joan Crawford would have starred in the 60s. It’s undeniable that Hunter has so much more to give to the horror genre than shitting herself but one hopes this is the beginning of a prolific scream queen era for one of the great thespians of today.

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