The Adams Family conjures a raw, ritualistic vision of love and loss in their most haunting film to date
When college student Mickey (Zelda Adams) is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she convinces her father, Jake (John Adams), to accompany her journey deep into the wilds of rural America in search of Solveig (Toby Poser)–a mysterious “death worker” whose legendary skills at necromancy may be the cure Mickey desperately seeks. But as Mickey clings to hope, her final wish strains her bond with Jake, testing both father and daughter’s faith in magic, their enigmatic host, and each other.
Ever since their breakout, The Deeper You Dig, a new film from the Adams Family has become something of a yearly litmus test for the ongoing creative evolution of one of modern horror’s most exciting filmmaking families. Even as they tackle bigger-budget, international projects, like last year’s Hell Hole, the Adamses remain fiercely committed to their stripped-down, DIY approach to dread, which continues to evolve in bold new directions. Their latest, Mother of Flies, honors a personal wish from their daughter and co-collaborator, Zelda, to make a film during her summer break from college. Inspired in part by the family’s real-life experiences with cancer and other medical crises, the result is more than just a hell of a way to spend a summer: Mother of Flies is the Adams Family’s most formally daring and emotionally raw film yet.
Right from the outset, Mother of Flies seethes with a provocative, lived-in anger—frustration born not only from illness, but from the systems meant to manage it. That fury is tempered by a quiet hope, the kind of resilience that only family can sustain. In one of the film’s earliest scenes, Mickey and Jake stop at a roadside diner, an American flag draped behind them as they talk through the brutal realities of insurance co-pays and red tape. Mickey, still a student, has tried and failed to protect her father from the financial strain of her diagnosis, while Jake has spent much of what he has finally clearing her bills. It’s a conversation charged with undeserved guilt, as each tries to protect the other from a burden no one should bear. Their compassion has been hijacked—not just by the cruelty of disease, but by physically and financially ruinous methods that society calls both care and cure. It’s a cruel truth Mother of Flies lays bare: in America, even dying incurs a debt.
Combined with Solveig’s jaw-dropping first appearance, writhing in a bloody, bone-littered pit, this early confrontation cracks open Mother of Flies’ most potent themes: a balance between life and death that pulses with mythic weight, the formidable moral codes and exchange rates of existence shaped by both Solveig and Death itself. Sizzling, scattershot flashbacks trace Solveig’s evolution as a necromancer, unfolding at the unholy crossroads of Lars von Trier and Terrence Malick. These sequences find beauty and intimacy within rot and ruin, as Poser’s poetic voiceover reflects on our instinct to reject that beauty in favor of delaying the inevitable at any cost. What begins as a begrudging lament slowly transforms into a kind of manifesto, an eerie yet convincing justification for Solveig’s centuries of misery, built on a claimed mastery of life’s true nature.
Stylistically, these passages are among the most audacious the Adamses have attempted, echoing the formal ambition of Hellbender and Where the Devil Roams, but here given room to deepen and evolve. The hypnotic swirls of image and sound break free from their more narrative trappings, leaving behind linear storytelling and leaning into something more elemental and eternal. Solveig’s worldview may repel, but it also reveals a realm beyond moral binaries, where the horror of death and the horror of clinging to life become indistinguishable.
Poser makes navigating the role’s layered ambiguities look effortless. In one quietly stunning moment, Solveig confesses she’s never seen the ocean—a detail Poser delivers with such plainspoken sincerity that her already private exchange with Mickey feels suddenly, startlingly intimate. Just moments earlier, she might have been bathing in stagnant blood and launching into the air like something out of a collective nightmare. But in the next breath, she becomes something softer, an almost pastoral Earth mother, genuinely curious about the broken family that’s found its way to her and what their worldview might reveal to her own. It’s this constant fluctuation that makes Solveig so mesmerizing. Poser doesn’t play her as a monster, but as someone who lives beyond the challenging binaries our limited understanding usually assigns to horror villains. In Mother of Flies, even the all-knowing witch thrives upon constantly seeking deeper wisdom.
Solveig’s worldview finds a striking parallel in Mickey’s pragmatic approach to her likely death, and in her growing frustration with her father’s relentless skepticism. Zelda Adams’ Mickey is inspiringly unflappable—not because she shares Jake’s fear, but because she faces death with disarming clarity. “When people pray, they have a lack of faith that life won’t give what it’s supposed to give,” she remarks. “And death will bring what it’s supposed to bring.” There’s an aching relatability to Mickey’s rejection of the usual “bigger-plan” platitudes of palliative care. She doesn’t cling to false hope; she embraces the near certainty of her death. But through Solveig’s necromancy, Mickey is offered something conventional medicine has denied her: elemental agency. Where chemotherapy might reduce Mickey to nothing but a hopeful shell with a reliably declining quality of life, Solveig’s rituals allow her to confront mortality on her own terms.
John Adams’ Jake, for all his equally unrelenting love for Mickey, cannot comprehend this. He’s unwilling to see how these rituals—however intangible, however dangerous—offer his daughter a form of hope that the medical Devil he knows cannot. The result is an emotionally potent dynamic that both Adams family members navigate with intimate nuance, cherishing not only the moments of comfort between Mickey and Jake, but also the deeply human collisions of belief, fear, and love. Their relationship becomes a microcosm of Mother of Flies’ broader meditation on faith and ritual: each character forced to decide what to hold sacred and what to sacrifice in their desperate attempts to assert control over the uncontrollable. As Solveig puts it, what faiths to trample on the path to her thorns.
It’s a compassionate nuance that the Adams’ shockingly translate to even Mother of Flies’ most gut-churning sequences. Make no mistake, for all of the film’s riveting ruminations on life and death, Mother of Flies is a gnarly-as-hell horror movie, especially as Jake and Mickey unearth further revelations about their witchy host. The stunning production design and visual effects—especially Solveig’s gnarled, tree-bound haven—set the stage for some of the film’s most disturbing yet strangely intimate sequences: an arresting period-era stillbirth, and the escalating agony of Solveig and Mickey’s ritual encounters. It builds to a shocking, deeply fucked up third act that leaves you squirming in your seat–yet, against all odds, it still pulls off flourishes of the same hope and beauty that the Adams Family deftly balance across the rest of the film.
While the Adams Family’s earlier films made clear their creative potential, Mother of Flies shows just how fully that promise has been realized. Mother of Flies is a visceral experience—equally potent as an emotional reckoning as much as a horror film—confronting the terror of impending death with a fierce intimacy and a bold, joyfully confident sense of formal experimentation.
Mother of Flies had its world premiere at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival, where it won the Cheval Noir Jury Awards for Best Film and Best Score. Shudder has acquired the film for a 2026 release.
