Change, Changing Places

Film: You Are Not My Mother
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

There is a long tradition of the changeling child in folklore. A young child suddenly “changes,” and it’s attributed to the actual child being spirited away by the fae or by some other supernatural creature and replaced with something that looks like the child but is clearly different. It’s actually pretty good evidence that there were autistic people a thousand years ago. It’s also a particular trope in folklore that has been sadly underused in movies. The closest we have is something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which is the alien invasion version of a changeling story. You Are Not My Mother is a film that dives head-first into the idea of a changeling child, and does so with good effect.

The film opens with us watching Rita Delaney (Ingrid Craigie) taking her infant granddaughter to the forest and placing the baby on the ground. She lights a ring of fire around the baby, and the film cuts just as we start to hear the baby crying. I promise, despite what it looks like, the baby is not lit on fire.

The main story takes place years later. The baby in question is Charlotte “Char” Delaney, who is a student at a Catholic school in Ireland. Char is a good student but is also very much an outcast and frequently bullied. Part of this is the reputation of her family (see the previous paragraph) and part is the actual reality of her family. Rita is still around, but is ill. Char’s mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken) appears to be clinically depressed. One day, Char begs Angela for a ride to school. After a near accident, Char gets out of the car and walks to school. At the end of the day, she finds the car abandoned, her mother having disappeared.

And then Angela returns a few days later, everything seemingly changed. She is wearing bright-colored clothing and is cheerful and happy, but Rita is immediately suspicious of what is happening (again, look to the opening scene). Over time, Angela’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre and disturbing. It also becomes aggressive. Angela poisons her brother Aaron (Paul Reid) by pulverizing some of her lithium and slipping it into his drink.

Meanwhile, one of Char’s bullies, Suzanne (Jordanne Jones) starts to take pity on her and the two begin to form a friendship. While not an outcast, Suzanne has her own pains and problems, including having lost her mother when she was a child. It is around this same time that Rita tells Char about her “birthmark.” It’s actually a burn from the fire at the beginning of the film. Rita was convinced that Char had been swapped for a changeling child and the only way to get the real child back was to more or less put her near a fire, hence the ritual. It worked, but Char was burned on her face. Rita also tells her that once she has been captured and turned into a changeling, she will always be potentially a target.

You Are Not My Mother builds pretty slowly, but since the film is only 93 minutes long, you don’t have a long time to wait for the pay off. The third act is where everything comes to a head—Rita has determined that Angela is a changeling (and to be fair, there’s some pretty good evidence), and she needs Char to help her with the ritual to bring the real Angela back.

There are some frustrating elements to the movie, and one in particular I am of two minds regarding. That is the case of Char’s bullies. Char is frequently victimized by a couple of girls, Amanda and Kelly. While both are nasty, Kelly is diabolically evil, the sort of character who would be the focus of a lot of movies. This is a bit of a spoiler, although it doesn’t go to the actual plot, but nothing happens to either of them. Kelly threatens to burn Char’s face with a lighter and aerosol can, and eventually shoves her into an unlit bonfire—this is a girl who appears to desperately want to murder Char, and we get no resolution with this.

I respect this as a choice in terms of the story here, because the truth is that most of the time in life we don’t get any actual resolution when it comes to a bully. In fact, in a lot of cases, the bully ends up getting away with everything they do. And so, the fact that nothing happens to Kelly is completely realistic. It’s also really frustrating, though. One of the things that makes movies attractive is the fact that we get that cathartic release when the bully gets what is coming to them.

I enjoyed this pretty well. It’s slow and it’s small, but not every movie needs to be a blockbuster. I love that it is going for this very underused corner of potential horror stories. The idea of the changeling child is ripe with possibilities, and it should be explored in more detail.

Why to watch You Are Not My Mother: It explores a vastly underused area of folklore.
Why not to watch: The title is on the nose, and there’s even a title drop.