M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters hits on a lot of points that I’m very passionate about and very intrigued with. It talks about mental illness, mothering, and just mother and their children in this society, particularly if a single mother.
It is a found footage movie, and this is a found footage movie done right. Basically, the premise of this movie is that we have a mother who is brilliantly played by Melinda Page Hamilton. You get a sense that this woman is in some trouble herself, that she is hurting, and that her perspective might not be completely able to trust.
As a viewer, you get the feeling that there’s something a little off about this woman, but she doesn’t overplay it.
But you just get the sense from the very beginning of this movie that you know that this woman might not be too reliable and this woman has some issues of her own, but she believes that she or her only son, Jacob, is a brilliant kid, a teenager, and he also might be a psychopath. She believes that he is very much capable of taking lives, particularly her own.
Ending Explained
Eventually, at a certain point, toward the end of the movie, Jacob discovers that there are hidden cameras and his mother is filming him.
He decides he decides he’s had enough and that you don’t know from this point on if Jacob is going to be this monstrous kid that his mother said he was, or if he’s just angry because she’s treated him like this.
Again very sleight of hand, it shows that this mother might have a problem with alcohol, which again makes her perspective a little bit for the audience’s viewpoint to be able to distrust her a little bit. Because, you know, she’s a little squirrely, and she also probably is somewhat of an alcoholic, and that’s not a great perspective to trust.
But again, this movie does it brilliantly because you do see Jacob doing some things with pet rats and throwing a brick into traffic.
And you know, even if he’s not a sociopath, this kid might have some issues. We just don’t know how far his issues are. We don’t know how far his mother’s issues are.
Toward the end of the movie, we do find out some of his mother’s issues, and she has a brother. And that’s another thing I like about this movie, mental illness usually runs in families.
Like, if you have heart disease, if it runs in your family, then the chances of someone in your family having it is higher than none. Same with mental illness, if you have people in your family who have suffered from mental illness, you have a higher risk of having it.
Jacob Tries To Teach Her Mother A Lesson
We find out toward the end of this movie that her brother, who she loved dearly, just kind of went off the deep end one day and went off to a lover lane and killed like 7 people and then killed himself, and the mother always has blamed herself, she doesn’t understand, and she sees Jacob just like her brother.
When Jacob discovers these hidden cameras in the apartment, he decides to teach his mother a lesson. And again, he’s a very smart kid. He locks her up in this closet and electrifies the closet, so there’s no way out. She’s basically a rat in a cage, and if she touches anything in the closet, she gets shocked. They communicate through one of the hidden videos.
At this point, the movie really has you fooled and thinking, “Wow, this that the mother was right; this little bastard is a psychopath”. And she’s locked in the closet, and she’s basically f’ed. And he is making her tell making her make her own video and telling the world that she was the problem and it wasn’t anything Jacob was doing, and she was the monster.
Who Is The Monster?
The movie does a really good 180 at this point. The mother figures out a way to be able to fool Jacob, and again he’s a really smart kid.
But even really smart people, sometimes the tiniest detail, can hang you up, and that’s what happens with Jacob. He has this master plan to teach his mother a lesson and he thinks it’s it’s all going to work out.
Then when he finally is forced to let his mother out of this electrified closet, he thinks she’s dead. And again, this is so brilliant with this movie. This is one of the clues where it really hits that “Ohh my God”.
The acting was just shown because he freaks out and he doesn’t do it like a sociopath would. He freaks out, and he’s crying, he’s like “ohh, I didn’t want this to happen to you, Mom”. He thinks she’s dead, and it turns out she just was playing possum. And when she gets out of the closet, she starts stabbing this boy to death.
Oh my God, Really? Because even if your son’s a psychopath, could you kill him? Even if it’s to save, to save yourself, or to save others? Could you kill your own son? I don’t think I could, but you never know when you’re in that position. And is she a monster herself, or is she doing the right thing?
What do you do when you have a rabid dog? The only thing you can do is put it down. No one’s going to believe her, and he’s going to just end up killing her and other people. So she kills herself, and Jacob sets up this chair and noose because she keeps having this dream of hanging herself. And she’s looking at the chair and noose.
But before Jacob had let her out of the closet, he made another video on his Phone. And it turns out, Jacob wasn’t going to kill his mother. He was just sick and tired of living with his mother’s head space that she was always blaming him, that he was always the problem.
And he thought that this would scare her and teach her a lesson. He was basically doing a very elaborate and very cruel prank on her, but she doesn’t see this video until after she’s murdered her son.
The Post Credits Scene Explained
This is not even doing it justice, me telling you about this is not even close to how it was shown. I mean it has such a dark, dark ending. And what do you do now? Because she’s killed her son, and it turns out her son wasn’t a psychopath after all.
I love how this movie ends, we get the closing credits of her standing there, and there’s still a hidden camera record of her. She’s just standing there, looking at the stool and the noose.
Also, stick around kiddos, because after the closing credits, there is a little scene that’s tacked on to the end of the movie where another mother of a son is watching these tapes.
They’ve been put out on YouTube apparently, and she’s watching them, and her son comes in and is kind of like how we open the movie “What are you watching, Mom?” It just suggests could your son could be next, basically, and the cycle continues.
Review
This movie is just brilliant, and I love this movie. This is as good as Found, this is good as We Need To Talk About Kevin. Now it is on a lower budget, and I’ve heard some people, a lot of people, are really digging this movie and praising it.
But for as much praise as I’ve heard, I’ve heard a lot of people saying that they really didn’t kike this movie. It wasn’t near as smart enough as it thought it was and it didn’t have anything to say about mental illness.
Now, I would highly disagree with all of those negative reviews because I don’t look at it that way. But some people say that the acting is very over the top and hammy. I couldn’t disagree more about that because I think that what really carries this movie is these two dynamite performances by these two very good actors.
The kid that’s playing Jacob really does give a good sociopathic tendency. Because there are some scenes where he’s very charming and the way they’re using all these video clips of him. You also see this dark side of him, but you know, that’s part of being a teenager.
Sometimes I think we all made our parents think at one time or not, we might be Monsters. There are times when you know, just as a parent, you want to kill your kids, and this movie literally explores what happens when you do.