Mahershala Ali Is Extraordinary in ‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,' Strong Film With One Ending Too Many [TIFF]

Bassam Tariq's second feature arrives carrying a ghost. For seven years Mahershala Ali was going to be Marvel's Blade, announced onstage at Comic-Con back in 2019, and Tariq himself was attached to direct before the film infamously spun out in development. Marvel has since yanked the film off its calendar, Ali has admitted it isn't happening, and now here the two of them are with a small, strange, hand-made thriller in which Ali is a blade-carrying assassin. Nobody involved is pretending the timing is an accident.

The reviews have been very positive for this film out of TIFF. It’s one of the better world premieres the festival has managed this year. Reviews: The Playlist (B), IndieWire (B), The Film Stage, Next Best Picture (8/10), The Guardian (4/5), IGN 8/10).

The opening is a statement of intent. A cramped, ugly fight in a basement bathroom, handheld and close, ending with a blade through the chest — and then Latif (Ali) wipes the weapon clean with a baby wipe pulled from his daughter's diaper bag and walks out. That basically sums up the movie's tone: a contract killer whose kit contains diapers, a man who takes life in the morning and warms bottles at night.

The setup is deceptively domestic. Latif is a devout Muslim, who just lost his wife, in a working-class corner of Houston, raising a teenage daughter Fatiha (Adia), a ten-year-old son Qadir (Jahleel Kamara), and an infant, Aziza. The local mosque, led by Giancarlo Esposito's gentle Abdul Malik, has held the family together since Khadijah's death. What the congregation doesn't know is how Latif pays for any of it. He kills people, he's good at it.

Then the frozen breast milk runs out and the baby won't take formula. The first 2/3 of this movie is essentially a scramble across the city to feed a child, and it's some of the most quietly intense work Ali has ever done. Hell, he even trues to hire a hooker to breastfeed. IndieWire’s Katie Rife is right that the film is richer here than in anything that follows. Tariq, drawing on his own experience when his wife fell ill, turns a logistical nightmare into intense cinema.

The action, when it comes, is stellar. Ali spins and kicks and moves like a man who trained for a franchise that never happened, and every hand-to-hand exchange has a grounded, thudding weight to it. Cho, meanwhile, is having the time of his life as Pastor Hwan Yoon, an Iraq vet turned evangelical zealot in a cowboy hat and diamond grills, preaching Christ with an AR-15 in hand.

Here's my problem. The final stretch, maybe the last 10 minutes or so, tips toward too many set pieces,. Somewhere in the final stretch there's a moment where it should simply have stopped. It's the perfect ending. And then Tariq keeps going, into another round of gunfire and the thematic material gets buried under the noise.

That's a genuine shame, because had it ended where it wanted to end, this would have been on my top ten of the year without hesitation. Ali is giving one of the two or three best performances of his career, Adia is a real discovery, and Tariq has a voice that's specific and unembarrassed and completely his own. It's absolutely worth seeing.