Writer-director Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother succeeds where other action movies fail because it has a real soul. The film’s effective thrust navigates faith, family, and the space between a man’s deeds and his stated beliefs. Sure, this has been done before too, but not as Tariq deploys here, and not with this kind of ornate fervour.
After his wife’s death, Latif (Mahershala Ali) finds himself beset on all sides. Not least of which is his most immediate crisis: getting breast milk for his nursing infant, the third of his children. It’s a novel entry into Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, since Latif is also a Muslim hitman in the middle of a turf war between Arabs and Koreans in Houston. Tariq draws deeply from these and other disparate elements, twining the grace of Islamic teachings, life in contemporary Black America, and cinematic violence. Taken together, the film is beautiful and brutal in equal measure. Ali’s performance embodies this dichotomy; his Latif is skilled with the blade, spiritually lost, and trying to protect his family. By turns exhausted, righteous, and warm, Ali is always watchable, owning the screen with a weapon or a bottle of milk in his hand. He’s matched by other performances as well, particularly from Adia as Latif’s eldest daughter and John Cho as a deranged Christian crusader. Through it all, Tariq moves his narrative with a swift economy, confidently planting us in places we haven’t considered before.
Like any religious film, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother does require a leap of faith. For Tariq, this means satisfying the bloody vengeance inherent to the genre’s setup with his hero’s moral quest. This isn’t easy, and the film almost doesn’t make it to the other side. But there’s that soul again, with Ali in the lead, willing us to accept the truth.
