The worst book I’ve ever read is Sean Penn’s Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff (2018) — read this paragraph and you’ll understand why:
Whenever he felt these collisions of incubus and succubus, he punched his way out of the proletariat with the purposeful inputting of covert codes, thereby drawing distraction through Scottsdale deployments, dodging the ambush of innocents astray, evading the viscount vogue of Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas, or worse, falling passively into prosaic pastimes. Instead, he would quake the elderly in all corners. POP goes the weasel! Bob’s mallet would speak. He knew his destiny’s turn.
Sean Penn may have some good turns on screen but he’s also written the above abomination, the worst paragraph possibly ever written. The book continues like that for the entire page count, an incoherent series of words strung together from a thesaurus.
Bob Honey is an international assassin who kills the elderly by bopping them with his mallet; truly, he just do stuff. It’s a venomous book built upon endlessly alliterative hatred for the elderly who allowed Trump to happen. It’s mean-spirited stuff, an agist mallet snuff fantasy, but most of all, it’s totally inert and aimless as a piece of fiction.
The Front Room, directed by the brothers of Robert Eggers — Max Eggers and Sam Eggers — shows no genetic carryover in their debut as filmmakers. Max Eggers co-wrote The Lighthouse (2019) with brother Robert, and you can see what parts he influenced; The Front Room is a bile-filled soft-horror movie about the elderly and their flatulence, excrement, and other fluids.
Like Bob Honey, The Front Room is hateful toward the elderly but it feels like an unmotivated drive-by, as though it is upset mostly with people becoming old and how gross that can be. That’s the fixture of the soft-horror conveyed here, there’s puke and shit, and some elderly-exploitation between.
The Front Room is based on the short story of the same name by British author Susan Hill, taken from an omnibus of short stories. It’s a slight story that does not justify a feature. It ultimately has nothing to express and while it creates a tense situation wherein characters are burdened, it does not meaningfully tell us anything about any of the characters by doing it.
There are two performances in the movie that are above the material. Beloved singer Brandy Norwood (blameless) plays Belinda— a very pregnant anthropology professor who is having a hard row of life alongside husband Norman (Andrew Burnap, he is there), who’s estranged mother Solange (Kathryn Hunter, trying hard) is moving in, exchanging shelter in her last days for a share of her inheritance after she passes.
Problem is Solange is a hellish figure at home. She has terrible incontinence problems — often shouting she’s about to make an “M-E-Double-S” before releasing all her bodily functions. This is a gross-out movie which is either meant to be funny or slightly haunting but accomplishes neither; the only thing it is, is gross.
Like Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, this may be a misunderstanding of how satire works, the Eggers Brothers not realizing that having a story with proper character motivations is required to make any of this mean something. It never means anything at all. Call it The Eggers Brothers Who Just Direct Stuff.
Apart from the known family name, this is a deeply confusing release for distributor A24, who usually find and release movies with ideas. The Front Room sadly has no ideas at all. Being gross and weird is not a complete idea. There’s the shred of a working movie here — thanks to Brandy and Kathryn Hunter trying — but all that’s left is a real M-E-Double-S.