‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’ review: Mahershala Ali is outstanding as a Muslim assassin in Bassam Tariq’s audacious follow-up to ‘Mogul Mowgli’

Dir: Bassam Tariq. US. 2026. 112mins 

As bruised and as battered as the soul of its hit man protagonist, writer/director Bassam Tariq’s rip-roaring Texas-set second feature is a spiritual quest as much as it’s a slice em’ up actioner. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother stars Mahershala Ali as Latif, a devout Muslim man whose moonlighting as a contract killer abruptly ends when tragedy forces him to care for his three young children. Latif’s life is further complicated when his former employer demands he take one last contract.

Tariq has re-defined the genre into something more introspective and compassionate

Premiering as a Toronto Special Presentation before opening in the US on October 9 and playing London Film Festival, the film sells itself on spontaneous comedy and precise choreography. Ali and Tariq, the latter of whom was then fresh off his Bata-nominated debut Mogul Mowgli, were originally attached to the Blade reboot, only for the project not to come to fruition; now, with Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother they have created a bold, artfully executed original action movie.

At the outset, Latif is in need of divine support. In the visceral opening, the film crosscuts between Latif killing a man in a bathroom with damaging saber slashes and fist-powered blows, and a reading of a Hadith. “A man came to the prophet and asked who deserves the best of me,” says the voice. The same voice replies three times: “Your mother.” The saying about the elevated placement of mothers reminds Latif of his own inadequacies when, during his killing, he learns of wife’s abrupt death—leaving him with their three children: headstrong Fatiha (Adia), mischievous Qadir (Jahleel Kamara), and tiny baby Aziza (Brooklyn and Jaxson Hughes).

Surprisingly, a good chunk of this film comedically translates the weary travails of parenting. Though Latif cooks, cleans and conducts homeschooling for his kids, he can’t stop Fatiha, for instance, from hanging out with the Mormons boys living next door or watching Furries online. He also faces a challenge when they run low on his deceased wife’s breast milk and discover that Aziza is allergic to formula. 

Latif’s quest to find breast milk sees him asking for help from his instructive Imam Abdul Malik (Giancarlo Esposito), a sketchy sex worker (Tiffany Boone), and an estranged straight-laced family member (Tramell Tillman). But ultimately his paths collide with his former boss, Mike (Laith Nakli), a vicious kingpin angling to hire Latif to kill Pastor Hwan Yoon (John Cho) before the extremist Iraq-war veteran turned Christian fundamentalist slays Mike’s porn producing nephew Haddy (Abubakr Ali) for distributing lewd material. Though Latif bucks against the job, especially as he tries to keep his contract killing past from his children, he can’t run forever. 

Here Ali emits immeasurable charm whenever he interacts with his children, and physical weariness that relates his fragile spirituality to the camera. This is a man who has strayed from God’s path and he doesn’t know how to return. Tariq and DoP Katelin Arizmendi aren’t afraid to grant Ali several soul-breaking close-ups or to go lyrical and even ethereal to illuminate moments of prayer, contemplation and anxiety. They also rely on open compositions and fluid editing by Cam McLauchlin to give Ali’s cunning swordplay propulsive poetry. Son Lux’s expressive score, oscillating between surreal wonder and abstract intensity, further elevates several exceptionally articulated action set pieces set in a strip club converted into a church and Haddy’s opulent mansion. 

But it’s this film’s tender center that feels special. Tariq nimbly accumulates devout considerations of family, love and tradition to make the ultimate statement about granting grace. He uses antagonists like Yoon as prisms to interrogate his morally conflicted protagonist, and calls for a cessation of violence to explain why family is more imperative than revenge. By reimagining the action hero through a specifically Muslim lens, Tariq has re-defined the genre into something more introspective and compassionate, rapturous and revelatory.