When I heard that singer/actress Brandy Norwood was going to be headlining an upcoming A24 horror film, the directorial debut from brothers Max and Sam Eggers (whose brother Robert Eggers is already very well known in the horror genre), I got very excited. As someone who grew up with Brandy’s music, and her work on the sitcom Moesha, or in the world of horror in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, I’m always rooting for her, and she’s been due for a comeback. It seemed like all the pieces were perfectly in place for something special to happen. So, come with me as I try to make sense of what went so terribly wrong in The Front Room.

Belinda (Brandy) is a very pregnant anthropology professor. She and her husband Norman (Andrew Burnap) are struggling to make ends meet. That is until their problems seem to be resolved by Norman’s toxic mean-old-lady stepmother Solange (Kathryn Hunter), who has been recently widowed, and is offering up her life savings to them with the condition that she lives out her remaining years (months? days?) with them. Solange is old racist religious fanatic and things don’t go well.

The central problem with The Front Room is it just doesn’t go anywhere terribly interesting. You have inklings of this going off the rails, and going somewhere truly demented or wild, but it never really does. And the ending feels like such a shoulder shrug, that it illuminates everything that’s been going wrong this whole time. I found out later that this film is based on a short story by Susan Hill, and I think that’s the problem. Maybe this would have made a decent short film? But as a feature length story, there is shockingly little going on here.

This is also the kind of horror movie where there would be no movie at all if one character, even one time, made a decision that made any sense at all. Nobody speaks like an actual human being, and everyone is stupid just for the hell of it. It’s also gross for the sake of being gross, and more than a little exploitative. There are so many scenes of this old incontinent lady soiling herself, I felt like leaving the theater. But I was literally the only person who showed up for the 5:30pm showing on this film’s opening day.

Brandy is never the problem here, and she’s game for whatever this is. Kathryn Hunter, who is always giving her all, keeps this from being an unmitigated disaster. Although the silly accent she’s doing means I’m never really taking this whole thing seriously. There is a subgenre of horror dating back to the later films from great actresses like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and that’s ‘hagsploitation’. I guess the image of Kathryn Hunter’s wrinkly, old, decrepit body is supposed to elicit fear in the viewer, or make us laugh, and the Eggers Brothers’ script never gets either one right. When this film is funny, I don’t feel like it’s on purpose. And it’s never truly scary. It operates in such a nothing middle ground, making this a deeply frustrating viewing experience.

I guess there’s some value in the production design of this old, creepy house and how that design evolves over the course of this film, but that’s not enough to keep you hooked. And the performances here are mostly good, but Norwood and Hunter do not really have anything of substance to do here, and it feels like a waste of both of them. Andrew Burnap is fine here, I guess, as the husband, but he’s also just kind of here, without anything substantive to work with.

This script does not have anything interesting to say about elderly care, about motherhood, or postpartum depression or racism. There are opportunities for the Eggers brothers to inject some kind of commentary about something – anything that means something, somewhere in here, but they avoid it at every turn. There really is nothing going here on a deeper level, at almost any imaginable respect. The Front Room just kind of lingers on the screen, waiting to die, much like its antagonist. It’s lifelessly devoid of anything that justifies a trip to the movies, or even a click on a streaming service. Hagsploitation is alive and well in the bargain basement section of the A24 horror library, but The Front Room forgets to be scary, or funny, or worthwhile in any way. Brandy deserves better. And so do we.