Achingly rooted in the tribulations of this world, director Basam Tariq’s “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” takes the trappings and tropes of the hitman story and baptizes it with spiritual sensibilities. The Islamic faith that defines Tariq’s assassin-for-hire protagonist Latif (Mahershala Ali) is not merely window dressing, nor is it just eclectic seasoning to separate it from other “contract killer with haunted past unleashes vengeance” films.
This movie is a piece of art that seriously grapples with what it means to be a people of faith, to offer grace and to labor for a better world when the world that surrounds advocates for the opposite. It makes room for rumination while delivering the most thrilling set pieces you’ll see in a film of this type, making for a gritty, aching and riveting cinematic miracle.
From the very start of the film, Tariq shows that sermonization and entertainment can go hand in hand. We see Latif brutally dispatch a man in a washroom, while we hear a Hadith recited from which the film gets its title: “A man came to the prophet and asked who deserves the best of me,” to which the prophet replied “your mother” three times before saying “your father.” That this not-so-subtle platforming of motherhood in the Islamic tradition is being repeated to us whilst we see Latif in the throes of his work is striking; even as he fights to provide for his family, he can’t help but feel a sense of inadequacy as he goes about his provision. When his wife dies in the hospital, he’s left to care for his three children, Fatiha (Adia), Qadir (Jahleel Kamara), and Aziza (Brooklyn and Jaxson Hughes), the latter of whom is merely an infant.
When Latif learns Aziza is allergic to formula, and they’re running out of his deceased wife’s breast milk, he finds that the American healthcare system is not prepared to help people like him out. Aware of his vulnerable state, Latif’s former employer coerces him to take on one last job: murder Pastor Hwan Yoon (John Cho), an Iraq War veteran turned evangelical cult leader who embarks on righteous crusades and murders anyone whom he deems hedonistic and sinful. As much as Latif tries to be Jonah and run from his calling, the big fish of familial obligation, the threat of violence, and sheer desperation swallow him whole as he slips further into the life he wanted to keep buried.
For Latif, though, his frustrations are geared not just to himself but at God. “My Lord, you take her from me, and you expect me to bow down to you,” Latif says during his prayers. It’s a raw, honest reaction towards tragedy and one that is given more nuance given Latif’s vocation. He deals with death for a living, yet all that killing hasn’t made the loss of life any easier. It’s refreshing to see these questions of theodicy, of the veracity of God’s divine goodness in a world so filled with pain, tackled in this type of film.
By acknowledging the reality of the divine, Tariq’s film eschews easy answers that characters who don’t come from faith backgrounds might have pushed aside: God exists, as does evil. As a person of faith, how do you make sense of that? What does it mean to serve a type of God that allows evil to run rampant?
Yet as heady as the film can get, Tariq never forgets to ground the film in the melodrama of the quotidian, which extends to the film’s action sequences. In the aforementioned opening scene, Latif, finding nothing in the bathroom to help clean the blood from his sword, uses baby wipes he’s packed on his person.
In another standout sequence, you may think you’ve seen all the ways to kill a man, but then Latif douses his latexed hands with Vaseline, grips broken glass shards, and begins slicing up assailants. Editor Cam McLauchlin turns Katelin Arizmendi’s cinematography into something resplendent, opting for wide compositions as Latif dispatches enemies, as if to frame him the way religious paintings would depict scenes from Holy books.
Even though these action sequences serve in some way as a type of catharsis, Tariq complicates the easy glee that comes from seeing the bad guys get cut up, focusing on Latif’s pained eye after he makes an incision or slash.
That’s not to say that the road to sanctification has to be without its joys, and Tariq cuts the grief and heaviness inherent in his subject matter once again by reminding the audience that these are real people, caught in difficult circumstances. Whether it’s a subplot involving the unexpected solidarity Fatiha forms with the Mormon boys in the apartment complex, or Qadir describing his struggle to not look at strippers as his “jihad,” all of the film’s humor serves as a way for us to love these characters better.
Ali has never been better, and there’s a synergy to how he plays Latif that is evident; the actor is channeling elements of his own spiritual angsts into the film. Cho, who gets to flex his acting chops and show he has more range than what previous roles have afforded him, revels in digging into Yoon’s eccentricities but also similarities to Latif. Yoon’s righteous crusades are no different than what Latif does; it’s just on a bigger scale, so who’s to say one man’s a sinner and the other is a saint?
The film’s most potent thematic and narrative offering lies in its exploration of the divine in the mundane. Latif feels that he has nothing to show for his faithfulness, and in one sequence, berates his son who wants to stop mid-drive so the family can do their prayers. He doesn’t believe God will answer, but as the film progresses, he finds his faith rewarded, not necessarily through major, Damascus Road-type revelations, but through moments of everyday grace, from the cool breeze on a scorching Texas day to the happy cries of a baby well fed. When one encounters the divine, when one sees that what one labors for has been worth it in some way, it’s an experience that is profoundly changing, and it’s fitting that “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” offers this gift of revelation for all.
Much ink will be written about how Marvel fumbled the bag with “Blade,” which had Tariq signed on as director and Ali starring as the titular daywalker. I’ll join that choir but also can’t help but feel that what Ali, Tariq and the collaborators have assembled feels not just like kismet but divinely ordained, as if this was the movie they were always meant to make.
I think of the oft-repeated spiritual adage that’s uttered whenever what others may have meant for evil turns out for our good: God works in mysterious ways. True as that might be, if we’re lucky in our lifetimes, sometimes we’re let in on the mystery.
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