An intriguing, if often baffling, concoction of religious angst and action vengeance, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother plays as if Martin Scorsese had directed a John Wick flick. Rather than Scorsese’s Catholicism, the lens here is the Islamic faith. Mahershala Ali stars as Latif, a devout Muslim who nonentheless moonlights as a killer for hire. It isn’t this tension that challenges his faith, however, but the sudden death of his wife, leaving him to care for his teen daughter (Adia, a talent to watch), young son, and newborn. Simultaneously, Latif gets caught in the crossfire between the porn-producing nephew of one of his clients and the militantly anti-porn pastor (John Cho) looking to violently put the nephew out of business. (This all takes place in a fever-dream version of Texas.) Writer-director Bassam Tariq never gets a firm handle on the movie’s tone, especially when trying to balance Ali’s earnest stoicism with sequences that seem to be aiming for comedy. Suffice it to say, the spiritual struggles feel unformed, especially in comparison to something like Scorsese’s Mean Streets, while the action can’t hold a candle to what we get in John Wick. That leaves Your Mother as a curiosity, if one well worth considering. Mainstream movies genuinely interested in the religious lives of their characters are few and far between, let alone those set in a Muslim context.
(11/9/2026)
