Mahershala Ali is swinging around a blade in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. That’s not a nod to Ali’s previous attachment to Marvel’s Blade. It’s of a piece with Ali’s character, Latif, a devout Muslim who also happens to be a contract killer, though he fashions himself a righteous killer.
Latif justifies his violence as divine retribution, dispensing victims he believes to have offended God. His sword, according to writer and director Bassam Tariq, is a part of Latif’s code, a negotiation with his faith. The film-maker seems equally purposeful in our conversation as we dive deep into his pulpy samurai-coded neo-western.
In Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, he grapples with grief, spirituality, violence and the culture in America writ large. The movie is a visceral and stylish genre thriller – think Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey by way of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. It’s also a textured portrait of Houston, navigating the city’s cultural tapestry, but also the hostility and tension between its siloed faiths and ideologies.
That’s the conflict playing out between Ali’s Latif, who’s struggling to raise three kids on his own, and Jon Cho’s Pastor Hwan, a militant evangelical Christian posting fire-and-brimstone sermons online while waging a heavily armed and indiscriminately brutal religious crusade. He describes a palpable contrast between what he refers to as the “Mamdani era” in New York, where he lives, and Houston, where he grew up. All the social services are cut.
So, if you’re going to go hang out or play basketball, it’ll probably be at a mosque or a church. You end up being a part of those communities. At the same time, you can start building dogmatic ideas, [like,] ‘We’re better than other people’.
The nature of it has been really politicized. I think it’s a dark moment right now.” Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother fearlessly cuts through that tension while capturing what makes those communities so vibrant and inspiring, and searching for a sense of hope in its heartfelt and intimate interrogation of faith and fatherhood. Those themes were especially important to he and Ali, Tariq says.
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