‘The Front Room’ is a theatrical gem, with a masterclass in the sort of camp, histrionic performance we saw in ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane’ when Bette Davis and Joan Crawford entered into a battle of the wills as two former child stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age, now reduced to trading in bitter, vitriolic exchanges as two elderly women no longer recognized or remembered by the world outside their dilapidated mansion.

‘The Front Room’ draws on the trope of the unwelcome elderly mother in law, Solange (Kathryn Hunter), who moves into the home of a couple about to enjoy the birth of their first child and who weaves spells both literal and metaphorical as she endeavours to control the way her grandson is raised, prepared even to destroy her daughter in law in the process. This is quite a hard film to categorize, as it begins with a quite sombre and reflective discourse on the expendability of non-tenured staff in an American university, with an adjunct Anthropology professor, Belinda (Brandy Norwood), heavily pregnant, whose contract is not renewed, following an exhausting teaching year, and who is facing a challenging financial future at just the moment she is about to bring a child into the world.

There are significant themes around racism on display, including an incongruous and jaw-dropping moment in which Solange even tells Belinda that Belinda doesn’t know the first thing about racism because, unlike her, Belinda did not directly experience life in the Ku Klux Klan and with a lifetime membership (she even has a certificate to this effect) in the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Without irony, Solange is claiming to be more of an expert in racism than her daughter in law, who is the victim of racism, precisely because she has more of a claim to what racism is on account of her own deeply prejudiced, Klan past. She proudly avers in one dining room scene: ‘I am a racist baby, goo goo ga ga!’

This is also a deeply scatological picture which presents Solange as being in full control of her mental faculties but whose body is diminishing. She is incontinent, and nothing is left to the imagination as we see and hear plenty of Solange’s toilet difficulties. At times this feels like a nod to Jane Fonda in ‘Monster in Law’, at other times it feels like a muddied attempt to emulate ‘Get Out’ with its blend of racial difference and tropes common to the horror genre. The religious mania, replete with speaking in tongues and attempts by an outsider-figure to take over the welfare of a newborn, also channels ‘Rosemary’s Baby’.

It feels like ‘The Front Room’ is therefore trying to cater to too many competing demographics. At the screening at which I saw it, the other audience members were teenagers who enjoyed shouting at the screen whenever Solange uttered her racist epithets, and in a marketing sense this disjointed and messy film (in more ways than one) is a very hard one to pitch.