Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother Review

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is an admirably bold film, but its uneven tone and misfiring commentaries cause it to be overarchingly disjointed.

There is a lot going on in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. After a swift, brutal opener in which hitman Latif (Mahershala Ali, of Wildwood) kills a man in a bathroom, the plot branches out into something surprisingly reflective punctuated by severe violence along the way. Latif receives a phone call from his teenage daughter, Fatiha (Adia, of The Midnight Club), informing him that his wife/her mother has suddenly died. We don’t really stick with this news long enough for it to make a solid impact, despite the event being the driving force behind the rest of the plot. It’s the first clue that Tariq’s screenplay is disordered.

It is also here that the surrealism of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother takes off. One minute Latif is doing his best to find breast milk for his baby; the next he is fighting a barrage of radical Christians in a strip-club-turned-church. Tariq is acutely aware of the bizarre set-up, leaning into comedy and serious drama respectively at the right times, but the tonal whiplash is unsettling and detracts from the whole experience. Said Christians are led by the crazed pastor Hwan Yoon (John Cho, of Searching), with their main aim being to murder a local man named Hatty (Abubakr Ali, of A House of Dynamite) who runs a Muslim-themed porn studio.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother flits from family drama to pulpy thriller to religious slow-burner, and more in between, without ever joining up the dots. The positioning of the two religious groups against each other is interesting, and the way Tariq charts the way belief can give way to fanaticism and violence is thoroughly engaging. These spiritual overtones fly around the film constantly, but again, very little of it settles. The uneven nature of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother never disappears, and the many tangents make its average runtime of 112 minutes feel much longer.

The acting performances are the best part of the film. Ali is great, a brooding and formidable screen presence as always, with his training for the cancelled Blade film clearly setting him up well for this one. Cho is equally memorable as the fanatical leader, who is as charismatic as he is slimy. Adia is the star of the show, with a nuanced, emotionally rich performance as Latif’s daughter (Jahleel Kamara, of Shadow Force, as the younger son Qadir has less to do, but is a good comedic output). But they all become sidelined by a film that can never decide what it wants to be; a visually inconsistent thriller that isn’t always that thrilling and a religious family drama that isn’t emotionally resonant enough.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother was screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 17, 2026. The film was released in U.S. theaters on October 9 and will be out in U.K. and Irish cinemas on November 20.