Mom and Dad

Mom and Dad is one of the weirder Nicholas Cage movies, and also one of the better. Here's a film with arguably the most disturbing birth scene ever, made even creepier by the Roxette ballad playing on the soundtrack; a film that asks, what would happen if the maternal instinct were suddenly replaced with the killer instinct? That the violence is exclusively intrafamiliar (i.e., any given set of parents is hell-bent on killing their own children but not those of, say, the next-door neighbors) is as twisted as a twist can get – and I mean that as a compliment. The movie wisely doesn’t bother explaining the origin of the parents’ homicidal rage against their offspring; this is just one of those things cinema has led us to expect from America's deceptively peaceful suburbs. Also, the cause doesn't matter; what's important is that this premise is a perfect vehicle for Nic Cage's bipolar intensity (he works wonders with his facial language, going from smile to frown and back again in such a way that it’s almost impossible to determine which is more off-putting). His character, Brent, is a family man in the midst of a midlife crisis whose latent instability is cleverly established in a scene where he sets up a pool table in his ‘man cave’, only to destroy it with a sledgehammer when he can’t get the table's surface to achieve full horizontality. Mom and Dad is a black comedy filled with paradoxical humor. For Brent and his wife Kendall (Selma Blair), stalking their sons Carly (Anne Winters) and Josh (Zackary Arthur) as they hole up in the basement is like a second honeymoon, and to explain why he bought a gun, Brent tells Kendall that “some psycho could break into the house. How am I supposed to defend us?”, blissfully oblivious to the fact that he's now the psychopath. And then there’s an exquisite turn of events in the third act, a kind of deus ex machina that actually makes perfect sense, involving a visit from Brent's parents, and including a fierce cameo by Lance Henriksen. In the midst of all this chaos, the filmmakers manage, in the brief 83-minute runtime, to establish meaningful relationships among the main characters, especially in the opening scenes but also through the use of of well-placed flashbacks.