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An Action Film of Family, Duty, and Faith

In 2019, Mahershala Ali was cast in the title role of a new Blade movie to be developed in the MCU. He was quite energized in his involvement for a time, but after several years of stalled development and creative clashes over how to approach the project in the Marvel mold, it completely fell apart. But Ali had already done a lot of the physical action training and had built up a good relationship with Bassam Tariq, who had been hired to direct the film. Rather than let all of that preparation go to waste, the two of them decided to pair up for a comparable project, one that would have personal significance to both of them.
There has very probably never been an American movie like Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, an action-thriller film rooted in the faith and cultural traditions of Islam. And indeed I doubt any studio would have greenlit it without the involvement of a name star like Ali. The title is taken from a particular Islamic proverb in which a man asks the Prophet Muhammad three times in a row who is most deserving of the best of them and receives such a refrain as a response. The role of the mother is an important symbolic tenet of this film -even in her absence she casts a large shadow.
Her sudden death is what provokes the father Latif (Ali) to return home to Houston after some time away in St. Louis. A veteran and a hitman who endeavours to keep the violent side of his life from his family, he has never been a particularly present father to his three children including an infant daughter Aziza, and is looking to change that while being pulled in the direction of more chaos related to the violent conflict between his wealthy employer’s nephew Hatty (Abubakr Ali), who runs a Muslim fetish porn studio, and the militaristic cult of evangelical Christian leader Hwan Yoon (John Cho).
Latif’s religious devotion and crisis colours this plot and is pervasive through the fabric of his and his family’s life. The bulk of the narrative takes place over Ramadan, and so we see the family fasting, praying on their prayer rug; Latif tests his children on scripture and ethics, and he himself is never seen without his taqiyah cap on. His faith is a primal part of his personal conflict and it is a critical texture of the movie that ultimately has real tangible significance as well. And it is fascinating to see how Tariq infuses it with the traditional tenets of the genre. He doesn't simply apply it like a coat of paint but blends it into Latif’s attitude and process. The movie is uninterested in using Islam the way that Hatty does as mere exoticized gimmick -indeed one of the movie's sharpest qualities is its normalization of its Muslim characters. This is not a movie that characterizes them in the kind of otherized Islamophobic manner often seen in news media -they are very ordinary people, something especially apparent in the style and personalities of Latif's older kids Fatiha (Adia) and Qadir (Jahleel Kamara).
The needs of Latif's youngest are an underlying source of stress and anxiety through the movie as the family is running out of refrigerated breast milk from mother and Aziza can't take baby formula. Latif's mission to get a prescription for a milk bank is interspersed with the narrative that throws him in the cross-hairs of Yoon. On both fronts he is diminished and overpowered, and in each case are consequences, real and spiritual, of his lack of attention towards his family up until now. Ali plays it with appropriate subtle weight -in one scene he is cornered by Yoon in a strip club-turned-church while Aziza is in the hands of one of Yoon's converts and the tension of powerless anxiety oozes through his stillness until he erupts. He makes good on the action, and in the climax even sports the katana he no doubt had been training with in preparation for Blade. But it is the humbler side of his character that is more interesting, the earnest desire to do right by his family in tandem with the consequences for his prior actions.
One of the most engaging facets though in interesting relief to the devotion of faith and family is the preoccupation the movie has with sex work and sexuality. It is at the centre of the battle Latif finds himself ensconced in, Yoon’s visceral anti-porn crusade and wilful equivalency of sex work with trafficking being the source of this ersatz religious war. Yoon’s presumptions are coloured of course by Islamophobia and stereotypical ideas related to Muslim sexuality. It seems to be something that Tariq is invested in shining a spotlight on -though he never depicts any of the sexual content being made and he does criticize the ways in which Hatty exploits Islamic aesthetics for fetishization, he comes down harder on the puritanism of Yoon’s sect. It is interesting that he brings up this context without exploring its nuance, or touching on the women and the men who partake in this content. There is grace to how it is discussed, and it is the Christians whom he characterizes as the violently repressive party where this subject is concerned.
Not all Christians of course. Importantly, Tariq contrasts Yoon and his followers with a friendly group of Mormons in the apartment next to Latif’s family who occasionally babysit Fatiha and Qadir. It is one of a few things in the movie that speaks to the distinct and low-key eccentric character of the world around Latif. It casts in relief the more intense areas of the story, particularly the showdown at the end, where Tariq's direction is at its most dynamic (and symbolic) and the violence is predictably the most accentuated. It is here that the movie crosses a notable line in its religious expression that usually only the worst Christian movies dare to approach. And it changes the movie's meaning and tone somewhat. Tariq is a smart filmmaker though and he illustrates this point in a strong visual and evocative way, couched in tangible feeling enough so that it gets away with what might otherwise diminish the movie.
I was surprised by how tempered this movie was -it is not the 'Muslim John Wick' it initially appeared to be -the action scenes are not prevalent and until the climax they are restrained. This is a movie as much about a man's crisis of faith and regret amidst rejoining his family and making amends. He cannot step into the vacated role but he can make it his own. That moving sentiment is what connects this story to the lesson its title references and makes Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother an interesting film that Tariq and Ali do well by. It is good to see a space made for it.

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