Mom and Dad (2018)

Brian Taylor's Mom and Dad arrives with a premise so blunt it almost functions as a thesis: unexplained static turns every parent in America into a filicidal maniac. Nicolas Cage tears through a pool table and a garage. Selma Blair wields a Sawzall. The whole enterprise runs on shrieking, splatter, and a dubstep score that has aged like milk. It is, by any honest measure, schlock, and it knows it.

For all that noise, the film carries very little of the modern social programming we are here to audit. The cast is white to a degree that suggests the filmmakers simply cast from a familiar pool; minority actors drift through incidental parts with no comment attached. There are no queer characters, no engagement with race as a subject, no environmental sermon, no body-image discourse, no neurodivergent representation. Mothers kill as enthusiastically as fathers, which defuses any reading of gendered empowerment. The generational resentment that critics seized upon (a generation of kids screwed over by their elders) flickers at the edges, faint economic grumbling, but the film never builds a class argument out of it. The satire, such as it is, gets buried under gore.

What remains is a curiosity: a nasty little genre exercise that gestures toward social commentary and then drowns it in blood. It lectures no one. It preaches nothing. It simply wants to watch parents chase their children through a house with a hose and a matchbook. There is something almost admirable in that refusal to mean anything, and something wearying too. Cinema has produced worse sermons. It has rarely produced a sermon this eager to abandon the pulpit.