Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Con Mum’ on Netflix, A Documentary About A Prominent Chef Meeting His Long-Lost Mom And Becoming Her Latest Grift

All he wanted was a mother’s love. So how come it cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars? In the Netflix documentary Con Mum we meet Graham Hornigold, a noted London-based chef whose professional and personal lives were soaring when the past he had never really addressed – and the biological mother he had never known – both rose up to bring him back down. Con Mum interviews Hornigold and his family and friends to gain insight into his year-long experience with an elderly woman who showered him with a mother’s love and big financial promises, but who always seemed a little short whenever the bill arrived. “You’re not ignoring evidence,” Graham Hornigold says of his thought process. “You’re questioning everything again.”

CON MUM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: “Just when you think you’ve got your life in order,” Graham Hornigold says in Con Mum, “you realize you just can’t escape your past.” In 2020, Hornigold was an in-demand pastry chef who had appeared on reality cooking shows like Junior Bake Off and MasterChef: The Professionals. His partner Heather Kaniuk, also a professional chef, was pregnant with their first child. COVID loomed, but life was good. And then Hornigold received an email that changed everything. 

“I felt like somebody’s baby,” Hornigold says in his interviews for Con Mum. After an abusive childhood and decades of buried emotional trauma, after 45 years of not knowing his biological mother, here was Dionne, an apparently sickly but also very wealthy 85-year-old woman, reaching out for a relationship with her long-lost son. After Dionne’s initial email, Graham and Heather were skeptical. But meeting her in Liverpool went well, she answered detailed personal questions about Graham’s birth, and impressed them with all the cash she was throwing around.

Everyone at the fancy hotels she booked knew who Dionne was. It was the same at the Michelin-starred restaurants where she dined. She bought him a Range Rover as a “gift,” and Graham believed her when his “mum” said she was the illegitimate daughter of a former sultan of Brunei. As they flew to Zurich, Switzerland – on Graham’s dime – to finalize the details of a multi-million-dollar inheritance, Dionne also said she had cancer, and had just a few months to live. “But if I die,” Dionne tells Graham in a voice memo heard in Con Mum, “I’ll put everything in your name.” 

It was while Graham was in Switzerland with Dionne – while there, he also introduced her to his friend Juan, and Dionne even offered to buy him a house – that Heather, at home with their infant son, noticed the curious financial transactions in accounts she shared with Graham. Plus new credit cards, established in Graham’s name, for Dionne’s exclusive use. Bills arriving for payment on a vehicle that was alleged to be a gift. Heather combined this information with how Dionne had been treating her personally – angrily cleaving her and their son from Graham – and became determined to confront her partner about Dionne seeming to take over his life and finances. “I was scared and angry,” Heather says in Con Mum, “afraid of who this woman is.”   

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In the Netflix doc Our Father, an entire community of mothers are duped by the deceit and sexual deviance of a local fertility doctor. Nelda Kodama: The Queen of Dirty Money is a 2024 documentary profile of a particularly unapologetic financial scammer. And the recent docuseries Scamanda explores the cancer lies and cash grabs of a mommyblogger and megachurch member.

Performance Worth Watching: As Dionne’s influence over Graham grows, Heather Kaniuk’s role in Con Mum switches from fretting for her life partner – how does she make him see the truth? – to dogged researcher. It is Heather who tracks down official paperwork connected to Dionne – paperwork that only generates more questions – and Heather who conducts Zoom interviews with other individuals, people whose stories all contain the same three words: “Dionne” and “Mother” and “Scam.”  

Sex and Skin: None.

Memorable Dialogue: Two statements Graham Hornigold makes in Con Mum feel pretty connected. First there is “Straightaway, I was in. I was like, ‘Bloody hell, this is my mum.’” And then there is “One of the things I tend to do is instantly love. I leave myself too open.” 

Our Take: Did Dionne drop a “love bomb” on Graham Hornigold’s head? Watching Con Mum, it certainly seems like that is the doc’s saddest truth. It works hard to establish how the chef was in many ways the perfect target for a scam: he was financially stable, with his personal details searchable, and had a backstory ripe for emotional manipulation by someone who knew how. But the doc is less successful at targeting where the love Graham wanted became the gain Dionne desired. It is not made clear exactly how an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman arranged numerous situations, like with hotel and bank managers, or financial system lawyers, which felt legitimate. Or even how she was able to ingratiate herself so quickly into Graham’s life. The significant results of a DNA test only come later. Doesn’t it seem like that would be the first thing? Maybe the desire for a certain kind of love is just too strong.  “I felt powerless,” Heather says in Con Mum, about the stress on her and Graham’s relationship. “It’s like a form of hypnotism where he’s not seeing things in a rational, clear way anymore.”

One day, after one email, Dionne was just there. And then her “son” was calling her his “mum.” And then it was an entire month of this. And finally, a lengthy trip to a European city, with Graham away from his partner and their newborn indefinitely. Disclaimers make clear Dionne’s denial of participation in Con Mum. But as her side of the story appears largely from Graham’s perspective – and straight out of his pocketbook – the narrative thread that emerges in Con Mum isn’t about the rise and fall of Dionne’s scam, but how its victim could commit so blindly to its perpetration. That Graham Hornigold and Heather Kaniuk are interviewed separately throughout Con Mum becomes one of the doc’s most telling features.

Our Call: STREAM IT. As a documentary, Con Mum often feels like it’s laying out the plot points of a “big con” movie. But as Dionne’s splashy promises balance ever more unsteadily on requests for short-term cash, you start to think like Graham, her son/target. How much would you invest, if it meant you could finally fill the love-sized hole in your heart?  

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