‘Mother Of Flies’ review: Fantasia’s Cheval Noir winner is a visceral, thoughtful folk horror

Dir/scr: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser. US. 2025. 92mins.

“The medicine is bitter but the cure is sweet,” promises Solveig the witch in Mother Of Flies – and she is not exaggerating. The latest, hand-crafted offering from cult favourites the Adams Family (John Adams, his wife Toby Poser and their daughter Zelda Adams) is a thoughtful fusion of Cronenbergian body horror and the supernatural that builds into one of their most accomplished films to date.

Retains plausibility while gradually revealing its truths

A win for best film in Fantasia’s Cheval Noir competition should commend it to genre fans, and critical support could help nudge the potential audience beyond Adams Family diehards. Shudder has acquired a selection of rights, including North America and the UK, with a streaming release planned for 2026.

The filmmaking family (Where The Devil Roams, Hell Hole etc) describe Mother Of Flies as “our fairytale manipulation of the darkly shadowed, yet love-lined pathways between a human life and death”. Inspired by their own experiences of illness, it focuses on college student Mickey (Zelda Adams) whose cancer has returned. The doctors suggest she has, at best, six months to live. Clutching any possibility of reprieve, Mickey makes contact with Solveig (Poser), a mysterious spiritual healer with an acute understanding of the circle of life, death and rebirth. Accompanied by her sceptical father Jake (John Adams), Mickey heads deep into the woods for a three-day retreat with Solveig.

The Adams clan make expert use of spectacular locations in the Catskill mountain forests of New York State. Solveig’s vast wooden home-cum-lair belongs in a Grimms’ fairytale, and appears to have grown directly out of the trees and soil. The shots of tumbling waterfalls, lush vegetation, flora and fauna all help to make nature and the changing seasons part of the life Solveig has endured. The dangers are signalled by sharp thorns, thistles, unfamiliar fungi, dubious potions and spells that could deliver harm or salvation. 

The filmmakers take their time to establish the atmosphere and ease the viewer into a story that retains plausibility while gradually revealing its truths. The sound design is particularly persuasive, surrounded by the buzz of flies, the chirp of crickets, gusts of wind and the eerie silences in woods that have stood for centuries. En route to meet Solveig, Mickey and Jake seem to leave behind countless signs of the modern world, from an all-American diner to a motel and the highway. The woods are far from the certainties of civilisation, revealing their connections with death and decay through rotting animal corpses and maggots to slithering serpents.

Toby Poser’s Solveig is a suitably regal figure as she presides over this kingdom, offering her vicious remedies and a highly personal version of faith. A mixture of healer and witch, necromancer and comforter, she reveals the thoughts that swirl around her head in extensive voiceover narration spoken in rhyming couplets.

Perhaps inevitably, Mother Of Flies increases the blood, viscera and trauma in its second half. One encounter between Jake and hotel receptionist Ruthie (Lulu Adams) provides rather a convenient amount of exposition, and the Adams are still a little too fond of blunt close-ups in covering some key conversations, Yet they also show a good deal of maturity here, putting their faith in restraint and the quality of the storytelling. Even the Adams collective H6llb6nd6r is more subdued in the musical score it provides, adding to the sense of unease rather than going full throttle. The result is a polished horror yarn that leads to a satisfying conclusion, and leaves the impression there is more than enough material here for a potential prequel or an extension of Solveig’s story.