We’ll start with the title: to my admittedly ignorant ears, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother sounds like a playground taunt, but realizing as the movie begins that it’s a reference to a passage in the Quran makes it apparent that this film is going to hold a lot more in it than simply the story of a hitman trying to save his kids with some killer action scenes.
And really, I should have expected this anyway—the movie’s made by Bassam Tariq, whose last feature, Mogul Mowgli, starred Riz Ahmed as a rapper who develops a degenerative illness, but a whole lot of the movie is actually about the ghosts of the British Partition of India and its continued effect almost 80 years later. This the film stars Mahershala Ali as, yes, a hitman who is a devout Muslim and who’s trying to help his kids after their mother suddenly died. One of his children is an infant who can’t hold down anything but breast milk, and so a major part of the film finds Ali looking for some way to get his baby the milk she needs while also having to deal with very immediate threats to his life, which I guess you have to expect if you’re a hitman.
His biggest problem is a Christian preacher played by John Cho who leads a cult-like group that worships guns at least as much as they do the teachings of Jesus Christ. And this all opens up the film to layers of ideas concerning the appropriation of religion for other purposes—violence in the name of religion, violence adjacent to religion, violence directly opposed to the tenets of one’s religion, and also using religion as a cover for cruelty. Cho’s group seeks to “cleanse” the world of darkness through inflicting pain on those it opposes. Another character runs a pornography ring that he sells as being “halal porn,” even though it’s never clear how that might work.
But, impressively, this is not even all of it. The film also honestly regards the difficulty and internal conflict of sincere religious belief—not blind following, but belief that requires questioning and crisis. Ali is magnificent as he loses and recovers true faith, with his wide eyes that betray a fear and emotion we might not expect from a man so hardened by death. This is a risky move for a film to bring in so much complexity to what could have been just a well-made action picture, but we, and the movie, are so much richer for it.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is in theaters.
