The best horror movies thrive when there's a menacing villain, which is most definitely the case with The Front Room. But not in a way I expected. How scary can the idea of your stepmother-in-law moving in really get? I was genuinely disturbed by Kathryn Hunter’s Solange from the moment she first appeared in the new A24 movie and, as the movie progressed, my stress for Brandy Norwood’s Belinda only increased ten-fold. So, when I spoke to the pair, I had to ask about what went into making an old widow so terrifying, and sound was important for that.
I found Kathryn Hunter’s insight to be really interesting when she spoke to CinemaBlend about the work that went into bringing Solange to life. The veteran actress broke down some of the finer details linked to her character, including those canes. In her words:
I mean, Max and Sam [Eggers] wanted a very specific accent of the South… so, I did work with a dialect coach, for months. She was wonderful. And the walk, yes, they had very specific ideas about these canes, which Solange needs and doesn't need, but, yeah, she’s almost like a spider, you know? And, that's interesting because you kind of take space once you have two canes. You know what I mean? It seems feebling, but she kind of uses them [to take power].
Kathryn Hunter is a British/American actress and had to work hard to embody Solange, and she definitely succeeded. The character is an extremely religious and manipulative woman who loses her husband at the beginning of the film and enters the life of Belinda (which marks Brandy's first horror movie character in some time. (And, hopefully, it won't be her last, given she could return for return for I Know What You Did Last Summer's new film entry).
Belinda is a pregnant woman who insists to her husband, Norman, that they take Solange under their roof (to specifically, live in their home’s front room) in her old age as she wishes to – ignoring how uneasy her hubby seems around her. During our interview, Hunter shared how the physicality of Solange was very important to how menacing she is, especially in regards to how she holds her walking sticks.
I didn’t realize it while I was watching it, but the star is right in that the way she walks is similar to a spider. Subconsciously, that surely added to how stressed I was throughout the movie. That uneasiness came in full force when I started to realize there's more to Solange than meets the eye. As Brandy also jumped in to say:
They're definitely her power sticks.
Another element that strikes me about Hunter’s performance is how the sound of the walking sticks made me a lot more anxious than I ever thought I could be. With that, the actress expressed how important sound was to the making of The Front Room:
And the noise of them, and, so we had long conversations about, oh, you know, but the floor is carpeted, it's not going make a noise, you want it to go clunk, clunk, clunk, and so, the thing was to kind of get the movement right, and the audio on the movie is fantastic, isn't it? And the sound score is beautiful. I think we both felt that our journey was brilliantly complimented by that sound score that worked on with Max and Sam, and with Marcello [Zarvos].
While I find it hilarious that any sound of the sticks on the set was pretty much nonexistent, Kathryn Hunter’s words definitely convey how vital the reverberations of Solange’s walking instruments are to the character. I might be a while before I stop hearing that noise, but it also means that the filmmakers did their jobs.
Check out The Front Room in theaters now, as it -- in my humble opinion -- now sits alongside the great A24 horror movies to mortify audiences over the years. Be sure to read up on other 2024 movies and keep tabs on upcoming horror films.
