10 Slow Burn Horror Movies With An Underwhelming Pay Off
8. Matriarch (2022)
Starring Jemima Rooper as Laura, Disney+ horror Matriarch sees the protagonist visit her abusive mother (played wonderfully by Kate Dickie) who she hasn’t seen in 20 years.
It becomes apparent that something isn’t right within the village when she arrives. Many of the residents, including her mother, look like they haven’t aged a day since she left. Even weirder, Laura notices a black goo leaking from herself and various villagers.
As the plot progresses, Matriarch only gets more bizarre. Eventually it enters the territory of black magic where it’s revealed that Laura was conceived by a god-like creature that now lives in her late father’s greenhouse. This same being is responsible for gifting her mother with the life-giving black goo.
As entertainingly wild as this flick gets, the atmosphere is spoiled by a chaotic final act that acts more like a prolonged exposition dump than fitting conclusion. Rather than the mystery slowly coming together, the answers are thrown at us all at once to jarring effect. The sheer insanity of the situation distracts from the broader themes of motherhood and trauma.
Likewise, before we’re able to digest anything we’ve just seen, an unnecessarily ambiguous ending succeeds in only further muddying the waters.