Not a lot happens in Mother, May I?, but screenwriter Laurence Vannicelli (also making his feature directorial debut) would very much like us to think that it’s saying a lot about the central relationship. Its premise is a fascinating, loaded and knotty one that provokes a lot of feelings and rather evokes Oedipus and Sigmund Freud in what it represents. The form the movie takes, however, is that of a chamber drama, in which we essentially only follow two characters through one hell of a relationship test. Can a man love his wife-to-be if she’s possessed by his recently deceased mother? That’s the burning question, and through a lot of evasion and vague sequences of what Vannicelli hopes will be tension, we don’t really ever learn the answer.
The mother’s death, captured in an opening sequence that is annoyingly discreet about the details, was a pretty horrible one. It happened right in the middle of the dining room in the old family home, at the head of the table where Emmett (Kyle Gallner) and Anya (Holland Roden) will now eat on their trip to dispose of the woman’s ashes in the lake on the property. The couple spends much of their time exploring Emmett’s clearly repressed sense of guilt about and sadness toward a mother who was a source of much trauma early in his childhood and whom he had not seen for many years. Anya has her own maternal issues, as the two are in the midst of family planning, to no avail.
What follows is a two-hander for Gallner and Roden, both of whom are fine in relation to the material they are given to work with. The gimmick here is that Anya begins mimicking the movements and attitudes of Emmett’s mother for some, probably supernatural reason, which certainly opens Roden up to introducing some unforeseen range within her performance. The problem is that Vannicelli’s screenplay never allows us an option to see Emmett’s mother for who she really was. All we get are glimpses of Emmett’s very early childhood via home videos both he and Anya unearth over the course of the story, as well as some anecdotes from a neighbor (Chris Mulkey) who knew her.
Gallner remains a sturdy presence throughout, but Emmett as written never really takes off as a character defined by anything other than his pain – his exploration of it through memory, his experience with it through whatever is happening to Anya, and the collection of scenes between the two characters in which each takes on the personality of the other as a form of couples therapy. There is a neat and rather insidious bit wherein we do not know which form Anya has taken during one of these self-imposed therapy sessions, but that only serves to hint at the set-up for the film’s climax, which treats the supernatural element of the story as a sort of toggle switch in a game with no point.
Mother, May I?, as a result, simply settles for a tired formula of figuring out whether Anya is Anya or Emmett’s mother in any given moment. Because the movie never quite manages to give us a reason to care about this couple or their problems, though, it just becomes tiresome for the sake of the game.
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