Mom and Dad (2018)

Mom and Dad is the kind of midnight-movie lightning bolt that takes an outrageous premise and commits to it with fearless, gleefully unhinged conviction—part suburban satire, part survival thriller, all nerve. Brian Taylor keeps the pace mean and breathless, letting the tension build in sharp bursts while the humor lands like a nervous laugh you didn’t know you had in you, and Nicolas Cage turns parental panic into a full-body performance that’s as funny as it is frightening. Selma Blair matches him with a surprisingly grounded ferocity, which makes the madness feel uncomfortably close to home even as the film rides its schlocky energy to bigger and bigger extremes. It’s not for the squeamish—this is graphic, profane, and deliberately vicious—but if you can handle the brutality, you’ll get a wickedly entertaining, pitch-black ride that actually has something to say about family pressure and modern anxiety.

Mom and Dad is clearly aiming for a nasty little suburban satire: take the stress of parenting, crank it into a horror premise, and let Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair go feral for dark laughs. The problem is the joke doesn’t evolve much, so what starts as a clever “what if” can quickly feel like noisy hysteria stitched together with slapdash plotting and escalating gore. If you’re not into graphic violence involving parents and kids, or you want your horror-comedy to be sharper and more controlled than “loud, ugly, and random,” this will probably feel like a waste of your evening. That said, Cage’s unhinged energy and the film’s occasional bursts of manic momentum may work for viewers who like their midnight movies mean, messy, and unapologetically tasteless.