Welcome to the Blumhouse: The Manor/Madres review – shocks at both ends of life

Being packed off to a retirement home feels more like a first day at high school in The Manor (★★★☆☆), one of the concluding pair of films from horror outfit Blumhouse’s hook-up with Amazon. This high-class facility is riven with cliques, and secrets hang in its residents’ pleading gazes – mysteries that fire up former ballet dancer Judith Albright. She is played by a grey-tressed Barbara Hershey (last seen in a big role in 2010’s Black Swan) and must be the most glamorous 70-year-old stroke victim in screen history.

Dropping f-bombs and refusing the house supply of chill pills, Judith believes she is wise to sinister goings-on. When the lights are out, she catches glimpses of a twiggy demonic silhouette stooping over the bed of her roommate. The staff won’t believe her, and a trio of fun-loving residents – who define themselves in youthful opposition to the walking dead around them – warn her to not raise a fuss lest it give the institution the excuse they need to put her on dementia special measures.

The Manor plays out like a simplified version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with an eerily serene, Ratched-like overseer and staff questioning rebel Judith’s sanity. Director Axelle Carolyn maintains a pleasingly teasing rhythm so it’s a pity that, as the sprightly nursing-home gothic fun winds up, it descends into Scooby Dooish over-explication.

Welcome to the Blumhouse variously includes African American, Latino and Indian leads in the set of eight films it has released on Amazon since October 2020. But the unusual 70s-set agrarian-supernatural hybrid Madres (★★★★☆) is the only film of the eight that goes beyond basic representation to actual thematic engagement with social issues. Ariana Guerra’s heavily pregnant Angeleno, Diana, and her Mexican immigrant husband, Beto (Tenoch Huerta), are in search of better prospects when they move to the Californian town of Golden Valley. Hired to manage the field workers, he doesn’t bat an eyelid when the landowner raves: “Those new agri-chemicals are a godsend!” Meanwhile, in their creepy old house, Diana uncovers old newspaper clippings about pesticides causing health problems in migrant workers and feels a journalistic itch that needs scratching. Likewise the weird rashes that most locals – including the kooky storekeeper foisting superstitious charms on her – believe are caused by an obscure curse.

Inspired by a real-life scandal, Madres feels well-grounded in its milieu, with a nuanced sense of the immigrant caste system in the 1970s United States – in particular the uncomfortable limbo occupied by Diana, a non-Spanish-speaking second-generation American. As she keeps sipping the agua fresca and facing down an unsettling maternal apparition, the film appears to hint that her hallucinations are an expression of her anxieties about the community’s health – and the ramifications for pregnant women.

While it finally swerves away from the agricultural question, Madres never loses a strong underpinning of social conscience that seeps into director Ryan Zaragoza’s considered shots. It has a rich chromatic palette, and its delicate transitions stand out, too – between burgeoning bellies and swelling fruits, empty crates and bare cots. Society needs tending, too, and what you reap is what you sow.

• Welcome to the Blumhouse: The Manor/Madres is released on 8 October on Amazon Prime Video.