by JD PROVORSE

WARNING – HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD

While there isn’t any scientific basis showing that maintaining a positive attitude has a direct, literal impact on reducing the progression of cancer, everyone in the field will still tell you that believing it can be fought, and that the fight is worth taking on, are crucial. I spent the last three years caring for my mother through a cancer journey that ultimately took her life this past November. What belief did for her was keep her going through three years of chemotherapy treatments, three cycles of radiation, medicines that took her hair and covered her with bruises and rendered her incontinent, to say nothing of the psychological suffering involved. But she fought until there was nothing left, because she believed it was worth doing. And it gave her a quality of life during that time that proved she was right. What belief did for me was allow me the deep honor privilege to usher her out of life as she ushered me in.

Mother of Flies is the latest feature film from Wonder Wheel Productions, aka The Adams Family, who have risen to the very top of the independent horror cinema world, as evidenced by this feature winning the prestigious Cheval Noir at Fantasia 2025. At the time of this writing, it is 96% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. This is nothing new for them. Their first horror film, The Deeper You Dig, is 94%; the follow-up, Hellbender, is 97%; and the third, Where the Devil Roams, is 100% Fresh. Even the 2024 film Hell Hole, while not strictly a traditional Adams Family film, comes in at 83%. And while these films are very much horror films, first and foremost, they are also stories deeply rooted in family and personal experience. And for those who care to dig a little deeper (no pun intended), there are powerful themes and ideas in their stories.

In Mother of Flies, Zelda Adams plays Mickey, a college girl with an unspecified cancer; though Mickey tells us she lost all of her reproductive organs as a result. Toby Poser, who plays the witch Solveig, has been open in interviews about her experience with cancer, and that she and Zelda both have Lynch syndrome, which creates a strong predisposition for endometrial cancer, and often leads to the damages Mickey has suffered. This is a perfect example of how their films have a very real, lived experience permeating them, an honesty and truth that can be felt in everything they do. John Adams, who is Mickey’s dad, Jake, has also had his own experience with cancer; though at a much younger age, which give realness to what it is like for Mickey to be experienceing this so young. Here he takes on the role I played for real – the family caregiver. And that positive attitude of belief is just as vital for those who do that.

Any discussion of faith or belief immediately begs the question, “in what?” And Mother of Flies is no different. While no specific names are given, Solveig is clearly a follower of some type of very old earth/nature oriented belief system. The people in her village when she was alive use Christian iconography, though Christianity is never explicitly specified. And with those bits of information, one could easily draw the conclusion, as I did on first watch, that this is a story of old pagan beliefs against new(er) monotheistic beliefs. A couple of specific examples seem to support that. Solveig says a blessing over their meal, and when Jake concludes with a snarky “amen”, she immediately demands that he take it back, calling it hollow idolatry, telling him to spit it on the floor where it belongs. Later, when discussing the villagers, Solveig says, “they came begging, bent in shame, trampling their faith on the path to my thorns. How easily the brittle limbs of the rootless tree bend and snap in the honest wind,” seeming to suggest Christian faith as “the rootless tree.”

But as I watched the movie more times (four as of this writing), something deeper emerged. The lack of specificity about Solveig’s faith, and that of the villagers, is intentional. I listened again to her words. Hollow idolatry. Rootless tree. The problem with Jake’s “amen” isn’t that it’s a Christian expression at a pagan table. The problem is that Jake is mocking the very idea of belief. He mocks Solveig’s beliefs through his snide tone, and he mocks his own lost faith (which Solveig has told him she also wants to heal) by using an expression he doesn’t really believe. The problem with the villagers is that they claim to be faithful Christians, but their faith is weak, the rootless tree. And so they hide, fearing the wrath of a god who they lost faith could help them. But if they had stronger, deeper faith in their own beliefs, could things have been different?

And that is the answer Mother of Flies is offering to the question of “belief in what?” And it’s belief in just about anything. This moss. This fuckin’ tree bed. Solveig and her flies. Ultimately, the object of the belief doesn’t matter. What matters is how much you believe. Mickey herself makes this clear for good when she discusses Cindy, another patient she saw often while having chemotherapy. Cindy tells Mickey she will pray for Mickey, and asks that Mickey do the same for her. Notice this is another example where no specific faith is named, simply the act of prayer. But Mickey doesn’t believe in prayer. She thinks that asking for what we want is a lack of faith that whatever life gives you is what you were meant to be given. But Cindy died, and Mickey didn’t. Jake insists this is not why Cindy died, but Mickey says, “maybe she believed in prayer so much that it worked.” And then she declares that she has chosen to believe in Solveig and her promises of healing, and to believe in it fiercely.

And to crown it all, the bloody and horrific climax of Mother of Flies illustrates this theme, the power of true belief. Jake is so caught in his loss of faith that Mickey feels he is jeopardizing her healing and demands he leave. While he is gone, Solveig literally cuts Mickey open, removes the cancer, and transmutes it before our very eyes into her lost child; a child she raised from the dead to have as her own and to love so fiercely it transcended death, quietly suggesting that, like Mickey, Solveig could also not bear children of her own. She shows us that when you believe, you can turn death back into life – that you can turn fear and anger and sorrow and all those negative things into love and joy and all the things that make life worth living, even in the face of terminal cancer. And as we learn in epilogue, not only has Solveig healed herself of the pain of her lost child, she has healed Mickey of her cancer to the degree that she shows no sign it was ever there, and she has also healed Jake. She has returned him to belief. They don’t need anymore tests. They, frankly, don’t care how or why – or, rather, they already know why. “We believe it,” Mickey says, and Jake smiles.