phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2026

Mother of Flies



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2025
Runtime: 1h 32m
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Plot Summary: When a young woman faces a deadly diagnosis, she seeks dark magic from a witch in the woods - but every cure has costs.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Another Adams Family affair, this one dealing with cancer, grief... and witchiness. You can forgive some occasional lighting and sound issues when you consider literally four people made this movie. Their writing and acting is where they really shine. Drawing on personal experience, everyone feels like real people dealing with real issues. It's surprisingly grounded for a movie involving witches, ghosts and magical healing.


Outside Reviews:

Matt Zoller Seitz
2.5 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

This one is fascinating and often horrifically gorgeous, but not hypnotic. It's like a book of horrifying artwork that you can close at any time and return to later, rather than a nightmare that won't let you wake up. But there are so many compensations that it's very much worth seeing for anyone who loves horror—especially the atmospheric and gory, dread-based type, rather than the kind that is single-mindedly obsessed with staging jump-scares. The central performances are all special. They're not studied. They feel natural, even though every other aspect of the film is unreal and uncanny. And the woods are lovely, dark and deep.


Katie Rife
Grade: B - The Adams family confronts death with heavy-metal style in Mother Of Flies

"The difference between a poison and a cure is the dose," forest witch Selveig (Toby Poser) tells the skeptical father of a dying young woman in the horror film Mother Of Flies. This concept can be applied in both science and magic, and Mother Of Flies is informed by both Western medicine and occult practice, syncretizing these opposing forces by filtering them through its creators' personal experiences with illness. The result is occult horror as potent as the snake venom in one of Selveig's dreadful "cures."