Seven years after the tragic death of her new born baby, Rose, in a hospital fire, mentally fragile forty-something Lizzie is still a mess.
She is still so weighed down by sadness that her husband, Mike (Luke Evans), has abandoned her. Her parents, Lena (Tracy Mann) and Carl (Pip Miller) are close to giving up on her and her sensitive, and still very much alive son, Thomas (Finn Little), is so spooked by her that he wants to live with his dad.
Things get even darker when Lizzie starts stalking a seven year-old girl named Lola (Annika Whiteley) whom she is convinced is her deceased daughter.
Though she flirts with going over-the-top into full-out crazy-kooky parody mode a few times, for the most part, Rapace brings just the right intensity to a role that has her on the verge of falling apart from fade in. Her thin, brittle glass figurine of a performance is something to watch. As she sinks deeper and deeper into her delusion-fueled depression, Rapace’s ghostly white face and her slight, boney frame works to her advantage by seemingly mirroring her fragile inner state.
Also, amazingly, though we know she’s stepped way over the line and needs to get her sh*t together, pronto, we can’t help but feel for her. Her brokenness nudges the broken part in all of us. That’s how good Rapace is and that’s why it sucks to type out the paragraph I am about to type out next.
What ultimately spoils AOM is the very same thing that got it made in the first place. It was sold, shot and released because it fulfills the very cheapest, yet essential, requirement of any given suspense film. The fact that the exercising of that requirement instantly turns the film – and Rapace’s performance in it – to mush clearly doesn’t matter a hoot.
AOM could’ve been a very dark and painfully intimate exploration of a mother’s inability to accept the loss of her child. Instead, our empathy is rewarded with a pie in the face.
Don’t waste your time with AOM. Instead, head over to Netflix and click on Ulrike Kofler’s quietly moving film, “What We Wanted” (2020).
Similar in subject matter, Kofler’s film is the grown up to AOM’s misguided teenager.
Kids these days, sheesh!
