‘Your Mother Your Mother’ Movie: Mahershala Ali’s Action Masterpiece

There’s an Islamic hadith in which the Messenger of Allah is asked by a man to name the person most deserving of his love, attention, and dedication. “Your mother,” the prophet replies. Asked who should come in second and third place, the prophet gives the same answer. The father comes in fourth. There is no one more important, the exchange tells us, than the woman who brought you into this world. Honor thy Mom. And then, once you’ve done that, maybe throw Dad a bone or two.

This saying is read aloud over the opening of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, writer-director Bassam Tariq’s crime thriller; it offers not just a context for the film’s title but an immediate sense of how family, faith, and the connection between the two will play a big role in what’s to come. The images that play underneath this recounting of holy text, however, are a bit of a shock: a knock-down, drag-out brawl in a dingy public bathroom between two men, one of whom resembles an ancient desert warrior. He is named Latif (Mahershala Ali). He’s a contract killer. He’s also a devout Muslim and a father. Judging from the way Latif uses baby wipes to clean off a bloody knife, you get the sense that the membrane between the two worlds is more permeable than even he realizes.

Then Latif’s phone rings, and he gets word that his terminally ill wife has just died. Given that the movie invokes motherhood in triplicate from the jump, it’s ironic that it will be defined by a matriarchal absence. Grief suffuses this this tale of piety and violence. So does a wicked sense of humor, a gorgeously garish sense of style, a kinetic way of choreographing mayhem, a respect for an often misunderstood subset of American life, and a genuine love of actors — there are not one, not two, but three performances in this film that inspire slack-jawed awe and gooseflesh in equal measure. That Tariq’s exquisite pulp fiction never takes its eyes off the prize in terms of who Latif is, his loss, and his beliefs is what makes his genre mash-up so satisfying, so stunning, such a complete rush. It’s three times the movie that you’d normally get. (Your Mother opened in New York this weekend and goes wider starting Oct. 2.)

Once Latif buries his spouse, he begins to take on both parenting roles. For years, his primary responsibilities — in his mind, at least — were “keeping food on the table, a roof over your head, and the wolves from the door.” Now the widower has also got to police what his teenage daughter Fatiha (the mono-monikered actor Adia; more on her in a second) watches on her laptop, how his 10-year-old son Qadir (Jahleel Kamara) interacts with first-person shooter games and First Blood TV viewings, and the needs of his newborn daughter Aziza. Specifically, Latif has to find breast milk to keep this baby fed, since she won’t take formula, and they’re down to the last few freezer bags. The community around his mosque and Latif’s own father figure, a strict imam (Giancarlo Esposito), help the best they can. But he’s feeling the pressure of, to quote Qadir, stepping into “shoes three times his size.”

Things are bad. They get worse. It seems the longtime broker of Latif’s for-hire homicide duties, a security-firm owner named Mike (Laith Nakli), needs a favor. His young nephew Hatty (Abubakr Ali) has a lucrative business making online porn aimed at Muslim consumers — the site boasts that it’s the Number One place for “100 percent halal jizz” — and it’s put the kid in the crosshairs of a Korean American pastor named Hwan Yoon (John Cho). His ministry, the Church of the Divine Fire, is a Christian nationalist group that worships God, guns, and right-wing propaganda, in that order. Hwan considers Hatty a human trafficker and a heretic. Mike wants Latif to make the pastor go away. He’s not exactly asking.

Yes, it’s the classic One Last Job scenario: Just when our antihero gets out they drag him back in. As with Shakespeare monologues and 12-bar blues, it’s all about how you put your stamp on tried-and-true formulae, and Tariq and Ali have infused this story about a morally compromised man in the middle of a Houston holy war with a keen sense of cultural specificity. The Lone Star city was also the location of Mo, the semi-autobiographical Netflix show centered around comic Mo Amer’s life; you might recognize Nakli from his supporting turn on Ramy Youssef’s auteur sitcom Ramy. Both of those series were dedicated to presenting American Muslim life in a way that was neither overly reverential nor simplistic and stilted. But those were TV dramedies. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is designed as an action flick as well as a portrait of a family dealing with tragedy and an insider’s look at an insular community that mocks harmful stereotypes without perpetrating them. Like Latif, the film is doing triple duty. Unlike its richly layered protagonist, who’s struggling to reconcile the disparate parts of his life, the movie juggles all three aspects of its storytelling so deftly that you stop noticing where one begins and the other ends.

Part of it has to do with Tariq, a Pakistani American filmmaker who partially grew up in Texas and has a knack for embedding a dizzying aesthetic into cross-cultural explorations. That’s a fancy way of saying he can take a story about someone stuck between two worlds and make it visually slap — see Mogul Mowgli (2020) and his episodes of the Amazon show Bait, two collaborations with Riz Ahmed that are way more than the sum of their parts. His skill for staging intimate moments between everyday people and action sequences brimming with John Wick-style carnage gets near-equal screen time, as does his eye for small touches and details that make big differences. Do not underestimate the effectiveness of a close-up of a freshly washed hand grasping a dying one. Or, say, using a glove, some Vaseline, and a handful of broken glass as both a weapon and a way of goosing a battle scene.

Part of it comes down to smart casting choices, and letting actors cook whether they’re going small or flying five-story-tall freak flags. The former is where Adia proves that she’s the stealth MVP of this entire endeavor. There are performances that make you go, “Who is that actor?” and those who answer the question of “Who is this character?” This young actor simultaneously gives you both in a non-showy, deeply moving way, as well as displaying a first-rate, slow-burn comic timing; the way she turns a quiet, shocked “What… ?” into a laugh line is peerless. Fatiha’s a unique representation of an angry, boundary-testing young woman. Adia’s a major talent. Meanwhile, Cho is using his gold fronts to gleefully chew scenery and his late-Elvis hairdo to suggest a rock-star persona fueled by curdled pop Americana. Given the chance to go big with his take on insidious zealotry, the Harold & Kumar star is both charming and gargantuan. This is some off-the-leash, career-best villainy shit.

And a big, big part of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother‘s success is thanks to Ali, who once again takes a familiar archetype and, like Moonlight‘s gold-hearted drug dealer and Green Book‘s uptight jazz pianist, fills the role with vitality, complexity, and humanity. Latif is conflicted by his double life, bewildered by his doubling of parental responsibilities, constantly trying to think two moves ahead yet always ending up three steps behind. He’s a man who justifies violence as righteousness, yet desperately yearns for salvation because a paycheck comes with it. He also really, really needs to get breast milk for Aziza ASAP, and that quest for “sweet female elixir” is both a running joke and a narrative engine. Ali is one of those name-above-the-title actors who’s so consistently good that you tend to take them for granted. Then you see a role tailor-made for them — literally, in this case — and it jolts you out of complacency. He gives you a nurturing father, trying to become three times the man he is. And he gives you someone who can believably use a sword, his fists, and whatever else is around to dole out pain.

It’s worth noting that Ali’s fighting shape here is likely the result of a different project he and Tariq had been developing for close to a decade. A proposed reboot of Blade, which would have starred Ali as the vampire hunter and introduced the character into the MCU, had been in discussions for so long it predated the first Trump administration. How and why that’s no longer a possibility is irrelevant — it now looks like that D.O.A. verdict was a blessing in disguise. Never mind Marvel. Courtesy of the director and star, we now get both a gritty, top-shelf action movie and an extraordinary character study, a much stronger and far more intriguing phoenix rising from those corporate ashes. Give thanks to your respective moms for that.