Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother

Friday, September 18: This screening will be presented with open captions.

A showcase for the immense range and singular magnetism of Oscar winner Mahershala Ali (TIFF ’18 People’s Choice Award winner Green Book), the latest from writer-director Bassam Tariq (Mogul Mowgli) is an audaciously inventive Texas-set action thriller in which the line that separates religious devotion from righteous bloodshed evaporates in a cloud of mayhem.

Latif (Ali) is a devout Muslim and a loving family man who also happens to be a contract killer. He has a strict code: he never uses guns and he only accepts targets the world would be better off without. 

After his beloved wife dies, Latif resolves to end his criminal career and focus on caring for his three children — but his longtime employer Mike (Laith Nakli, TIFF ’25’s Lucky Lu) has other plans. Latif is having a hard enough time finding breast milk for his baby girl and wants no part in Mike and cowboy Haun Yoon’s (John Cho) rapidly escalating feud but, as his bloodstained past comes back to haunt him, he may have no choice in the matter.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother — its title a reference to an Islamic hadith — is a wild ride, overflowing with spectacle and suspense, tenderness and violence. As Latif navigates a minefield of viciousness and fanaticism, he’s also forced to confront his own moral hypocrisies. Only Ali could embody such a delicate balance of menace and grace. 

ROBYN CITIZEN

Content advisory: explicit violence, sexual content, coarse language, mature themes