Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Matriarch’ on Hulu, A Chilling Cocktail of Body and Folk Horror

Hulu original Matriarch combines any number of signifiers familiar to fans of the horror genre. You’ve got a body that acts in mysterious ways when put under strain. There’s a small town with a lot of secrets hiding behind the omnipresent religious iconography. Ben Steiner has all the ingredients for a potent brew inside his filmmaking cauldron – but how will they combine?

MATRIARCH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Tense urban professional Laura (Jemima Rooper) lives a hermetically sealed life with little room for unwelcome surprises, but one finds her anyways in the form of an overdose she manages to survive. Matriarch represents the incident through a form of black sludge that first consumes her at rock bottom… and then Laura begins to produce the strange substance through her own body. Reeling, she returns back to her rural British hometown to seek comfort – or, more likely, confrontation – with her estranged mother Celia (Kate Dickie). As Laura journeys deeper into the mysteries of herself, she’s inextricably drawn into the dark underbelly of her community. There’s something solemn, if not outright sinister, lurking underneath their pleasantry and piety that she can no longer deny if she seeks resolution and redemption.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A distressed female body spewing unidentifiable black gunk has big Titane energy, albeit remixed for folk horror rather than something so metal, and some of its more abstract sequences feel very Under the Skin. But the way Matriarch locates such terror and power inside a mother-daughter relationship recalls a genre classic like Carrie (or a more recent underrated gem like Natalie Erika James’ Relic).

Performance Worth Watching: Where Matriarch really shines is in the two central mother-daughter performances by Jemima Rooper and Kate Dickie. Without the former providing a grounded entry point into an increasingly bizarre set of events, the audience might get lost in a sea of strangeness. Without the latter able to embody a specific kind of folk energy (she did star in The Witch and The Green Knight, after all), the film’s horror elements might feel like surrealistic flourishes detached from reality.

Memorable Dialogue: “I don’t want mercy, I want answers,” an exasperated Laura says near the end of Matriarch as the events begin to swirl out of control. It’s a great summarization of how she stands in for the audience’s experience, caring little to feel and just wanting to understand.

Sex and Skin: The first shot of the film is of a man’s naked bum as he walks into a mysterious body of water in the woods, so you know the film is going to go to some freaky places. The sexuality and skin get progressively weirder as Matriarch continues until maybe you no longer see the human body as a site for lust. To give too many details about the film’s most skin-filled scene would spoil the ending, but let’s just say the occult elements do eventually intersect with its carnal ones.

Our Take: Ben Steiner tackles an ambitious number of themes and styles in his first solo directorial outing – and crams them all in under 85 minutes, no less! The resolution of Matriarch does feel a bit rushed and forced, but the film casts an undeniable spell as it builds up to an explosive climax. The atmospheric elements of the film are truly eerie and unsettling in a way horror films rarely are, largely because Steiner always roots the creepiness in recognizable corporal and carnal expressions.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Matriarch is a slender, scary fusion of horror subgenres. With great performances, strong craftsmanship, and downright creepy vibes, it’s an ideal spooky season movie night.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.