The Shocking Ending of Brandy’s New A24 Horror Film May Not Be What You Think, Say ‘The Front Room’ Directors

• Brandy stars in a new A24 film called “The Front Room” — her first horror film in years.

• BI spoke with “The Front Room” writers and directors Max and Sam Eggers.

• The Eggers brothers dissect the film’s inspirations, its most shocking moments and the final twist.

“The Front Room” marks Brandy’s return to the horror genre, more than 25 years after starring in “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.”

The singer and actress plays Belinda, a pregnant woman still reeling from the loss of her first child, Wallace, who was stillborn when her husband’s evangelical and deeply evil mother-in-law, Solange (Kathryn Hunter), breaks into their home after Norman’s father dies.

Solange promises to leave her son Norman (Andrew Burnap) and Belinda all her money after she dies. The catch? They must take care of her during what she claims are her final days.

The young couple, who are struggling financially, reluctantly accept the offer. But they soon regret it. The extremely religious (and racist) Solange begins to take control of their home and their lives, even going so far as to claim their unborn daughter.

Warning: Spoilers for the ending of “The Front Room.”

After much tension, many of which, a lot scenes of a pregnant and freshly postpartum Belinda being forced to clean up after an incontinent Solange (and an extremely horrifying hallucination of Solange breastfeeding adult Norman), Belinda finally reaches her breaking point.

When Norman confronts Belinda about a bite on their newborn daughter Laurie’s arm, Belinda tells him that Solange must have bitten the baby. She demands that Norman remove her from their home.

Solange doesn’t take this well, spitting in Norman’s face when he tells her she has to leave, and spends the rest of the night screaming, “Why can’t I die?” Ironically, in the morning, just after Belinda finally manages to breastfeed Laurie (who was having trouble latching on), she goes down to Solange’s room to find the menace dead in her bed.

At first, it appears that Solange died of natural causes, an expected development in her decline throughout the film. After her death, Norman and Belinda start their lives over in a new house, and Belinda, now pregnant with twins, happily goes to a new job interview.

The big twist comes in the film’s final seconds, when Belinda’s flashback to her job interview seems to reveal that she actually suffocated Solange to death to end the ordeal.

In an interview with Sam and Max Eggers, the brothers who wrote and directed the film, we break down the film’s most shocking moments, how Brandy was cast, and why that final twist might not be exactly what you think.

“The Front Room” is based on a short story by Susan Hill from her 2016 book, “The Traveling Bag and Other Ghostly Stories.” How did you decide to adapt this story for your feature film debut?

Max: It was given to me by our producers, and I shared it with Sam after we read it. We were lucky to have it because we had just been through a similar experience of caring for our grandfather, watching him decline. So we knew exactly how to adapt it.

Sat : I don’t know if you’ve ever cared for someone who is in decline, but when you open a door, you never know what you’re going to find. This all came out of our personal experience of caring for our grandfather and trying to reflect that on screen.

The short story is a really terrifying piece, but I think we wanted to be a little more outrageous.

It’s interesting because you took the basics of this story and added many more layers to it. Describe the process of adjusting the source material to fit your personal experience.

Sam: Trying to make the story personal kind of drove it all. In the novella, it’s set in England, the Irwins are religious and Solange isn’t. But Max and I aren’t religious and we didn’t grow up that way, so we adapted the story to a modern context, bringing it to the United States and turning it around to make Solange the religious, conservative Christian from the South.

Max: We always make sure to point out, of course, that this film is not representative of all older people or what happens when you’re dying. Solange is so unique, and… we took inspiration from our grandfather. He was nothing like him. He was a Southern gentleman, but he had isms, an accent, and he was charming even though he had become this baby that, I guess, in a way, we had to take care of. And it was surreal, and sometimes hilarious.

Speaking of hilarious, the tone of the film was surprisingly humorous. What were your inspirations for the kitsch elements?

Max: “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” was a big inspiration for us. Because when you watch that movie, it’s weird. … It’s a thriller, but it’s also really funny, surprisingly, and it deals with serious subjects like we do, but it sheds a unique light on those subjects and tries to confront you with difficult subjects.

The original story has no racial element. Was Belinda always a black woman in the story as you had imagined her?

Sam: As we had imagined, yes. This equation between the evil mother and the good mother is an immemorial story, several millennia old. But… if you want to do something that is close to “Baby Jane”, but also to “Rosemary’s Baby”, if you want to do it again, it has to be something relevant.

From an archetypal perspective, I think Solange represents the most evil of evil stepmothers. That was our vision of her, and to make her a white, Christian, conservative woman from the South representing the patriarchal part of our society, well, what’s the opposite of that? Who is our Cinderella?

And I think that’s why it was important that it was a woman of color, a black woman, and that the audience identified with her in the face of this force that we have to kind of confront and kind of stifle.

How did you find each member of your cast?

Max: Well, the first person chosen for the role was Kathryn. It was a challenge to find someone willing to do all that. For Belinda, it was difficult to find someone as it was for Solange.

We were looking for someone who would be willing to do anything with Solange. Finding that Cinderella that you could immediately believe in, buy into, and root for — Brandy got that right away. She brought so much personal connection to this project and really wanted to challenge herself and do it all.

You said it was difficult to cast these roles. Why?

Max: It wasn’t really the actors or anything like that. It was just people saying, “You want my client to do What“You want my client to be recognized for farting on camera?” It’s a tough subject, to put it in a way. And then I think you just have to find someone like Kathryn who is willing, who wants to explore the dark side of things and who is willing to be covered in stuff and says, “More, please. Put more in.”

Sam: I remember while we were rehearsing, she took us aside and she said, “I think there should be more poop.”

How much of Solange’s very particular physicality was present in the script versus what Kathryn brought to the performance?

Sam: There were specific things in the script, but of course, I think Kathryn brought her own magic to it. I think the type of canes she used was something she was researching, trying to figure out what was right. The way her feet moved was all her own. I mean, she practiced for months trying to get it right.

Max: There’s a scene where Solange is running down the hallway with a pillow, and there’s so much footage, I’d say five, six, seven takes of Kathryn doing these completely improvised, incredible physical comedy bits with this pillow.

One of the most disturbing scenes is Belinda’s hallucination of Solange breastfeeding Norman. What was the atmosphere like on the set during that moment?

Max: I have to say the thing that hurts me the most in that scene is Andrew’s back. Because he had to stay in a certain position for so long, and he thought, after several takes, “Guys, this must be it because my back…”

Sam: And the thing that was milk was actually oatmeal or something. And at the end, he was like, “I’m going to throw up. This smells so bad,” but everyone was involved, including Andrew.

It’s still unclear whether Solange is actually in contact with a supernatural force, with clues like Belinda’s rapidly healing C-section scar and the fact that Solange somehow knows Wallace’s name. Was this intentionally ambiguous?

Max: Absolutely. Belinda is also present in every scene, and everything happens from her point of view, and we are very attentive to her reliability as a narrator?

We were very inspired by a lot of movies, but one in particular was The Innocents from the ’60s, with Deborah Kerr in the lead role. It’s one of the greatest ghost stories of all time, but it’s a master lesson in the art of ambiguity and the unreliable narrator: “How much of what I’m seeing is real? Are there ghosts or not?” That was something that was a touchstone for us.

The ending is also a bit ambiguous. We never saw Solange bite the baby, as Belinda accused her of doing. Personally, I wasn’t convinced and wondered if Belinda did it herself to give Norman the push he needed to finally get Solange out of there.

Max: Yes, absolutely. It’s intentional.

From an unreliable narrator’s perspective, from a genre perspective, we want people, even at the end, to be wondering, “Did she really do that? Did she kill Solange? Is that really what happened? Or is it just some kind of fantasy that she imagined she did that?”

As far as the bite mark, I think we don’t want to have answers per se, but we want people to ask themselves, “Could she really have done that?”

Sam: I think it also brings us to the question of how someone like Solange can affect us and what we become because of it. And often, if we let it, we can become that thing that we fear.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“The Front Room” is now in theaters.

Read the original article on Business Insider