Written by Anna Harrison
25/100
There’s a chance I might have enjoyed Mother Schmuckers if I were a frat bro sitting in my frat house with my fellow frat friends and we were all very high. Unfortunately, I am not a frat bro, and I watched this stone-cold sober in my bedroom.
Mother Schmuckers begins with its two lead characters, brothers Issachar (Maxi Delmelle) and Zabulon (Harpo Guit) attempting to force-feed their sex worker mother (Claire Bodson) their own fried shit. Their mother promptly vomits, and we are forced to look at the bile as the title card appears in it. Things don’t get any more sophisticated from there.
The bulk of the movie chronicles the brothers’ attempts to get their dog, January Jack (whom their mother—understandably, might I add—loves more than them), back home after they lost him. What follows is one vile thing after another, from bestiality to necrophilia, ostensibly played for laughs but lacking in any humor whatsoever.
There are the faintest glimmers of something funny, such as when the brothers acquire a gun and chase each other through the streets of Brussels and onlookers think these two idiots are terrorists, or when the two are roped into dancing for a terrible music video. There are the briefest glimpses of an emotional undercurrent regarding the boys’ relationship to their mother, but any tenderness is quickly zapped away by whatever appalling hijinks Issachar and Zabulon get into next. The low-budget, frenetic cinematography and editing could almost be charming if they weren’t showcasing such uncharming scenes. So, what are we left with? Not much, it would seem.
The problem is not that the brothers are completely irredeemable—media is full of morally murky protagonists, and when done well, we still are invested in them at the end of the day regardless of their morality. We can even find them funny: I don’t think anyone would call the gang in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia upstanding citizens, but it’s the longest-running American television comedy because it makes its characters’ unlikability funny. Mother Schmuckers, however, foolishly equates crassness and grossness with humor, leaving us with a distinctly unfunny movie that lacks any sort of pathos, therefore eliciting no emotion other than disgust.
Mother Schmuckers does not ever attempt to be a sophisticated film (aside from a brief appearance by Mathieu Amalric, whom I can only assume was forced at gunpoint to be in this), but it seems to think it’s a funny one. It’s wrong.
Mother Schmuckers Trailer
Mother Schmuckers (Fils de plouc) is currently playing the Sundance 2021 Film Festival.
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