Mahershala Ali Is at His Blade-Trained Best in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother

I can’t decide if Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a love letter to Houston, where it’s set, or a poison pen one. In the movie, which was written and directed by Bassam Tariq, the city is portrayed as a hideous, glorious multicultural sprawl of strips malls, McMansions, and bedraggled apartment complexes, powerlines and overpasses criss-crossing overhead like they’re holding the whole impossible affair together. Fluorescent-lit houses of worship exist next to strip clubs which exist next to South Asian buffets which exist next to convenience stores, often with more overlap between them than anyone involved cares to acknowledge. At one point during the film, an evangelical church service takes place on a stage that recently hosted pole dancers. At another, we get a look at a locally run porn site called “Bang Akhs,” which tours itself as the “#1 source for halal certified jizz.” The illusion that there’s a clear, bright line between the sacred and the profane is a particularly flimsy one here, which is a problem for the film’s hero, Latif (Mahershala Ali), a recently widowed father of three who’s struggling to maintain the division between his family life and the work he does as a hitman for a local Arab big shot named Mike Mahmoudi (Laith Nakli).

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a film about faith, grief, fatherhood, and stabbing people to death, and it whips ass in a way that makes its origin story feel downright serendipitous. Tariq and Ali were both attached to Marvel’s now-defunct Blade remake, which died on the vine after years of delays and corporate indecision. Tariq, who left the project in late 2022, wrote the original screenplay with Ali in mind. And Ali, who’d go on to spend a year training to do superhero stunts, was able to put his swordfighting skills to use in a very different context. Latif doesn’t use a gun, part of a code that exists only in his head — like Ghost Dog, he approaches his bloody calling with anachronistic weapons and rules that allow him to act as though what he’s doing is more honorable than its tawdry reality. A devout Muslim, Latif treats the hits he carries out as acts of righteous violence in defense of his community, a pretense that’s easier for the first kill we see him perform, a scrabbling murder of a white supremacist in a bathroom, than it is for the target he’s given next. When he’s tasked to take out Hwan Yoon (John Cho), the pastor of a heavily-armed church on an anti-porn crusade that’s put Mike’s nephew’s business in its cross-hairs, it starts to feel like Latif is actually an enlistee in a gang war in religious garb.

Latif, on the other hand, has always taken his faith very seriously — at least until it was shaken by the death of Khadija (Shakirah DeMesier), who was not just his wife and spiritual rock, but is also the one holding the household together during his frequent absences. It’s obvious that Latif isn’t used to being the go-to parent, especially given that, in addition to his teenage daughter Fatiha (Adia) and ten-year-old son Qadir (Jahleel Kamara), he’s now the sole caretaker to a baby who can’t hold down formula, sending him scurrying around town looking for ways to procure breast milk. He’s accustomed to being the stern patriarch, the provider and the enforcer of norms, never fallible or vulnerable. Being put in such close contact with his kids doesn’t merely threaten to expose what he’s been doing to pay the bills, but also to disrupt his sense of self. Ali’s physicality is impressive during the action scenes, which Tariq films with an artful efficiency and surprising sense of humor, but his best trick is to quietly project regret after taking out his frustration and grief on his kids, unable to bring himself to say sorry or to let them into what he’s feeling. With Khadija gone, it’s only the head of the family’s mosque (Giancarlo Esposito) who understands Latif in his entirety, and who takes him to task for his own hypocrisies and the role of holy warrior he’s assigned himself. 

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, named for a hadith about a man who asked the prophet “Who deserves the best of me?”, is incredibly earnest about the power of religious belief while also being sly about the ways in which people can use it to rationalize what they already wanted to do. Latif, whose painstakingly partitioned life comes crashing down over a few days, sometimes leaving him scrambling through a gunfight while wearing his infant in a carrier, has used his faith to give his brutality a righteous fervor. When he meets Yoon — the best characters Cho’s played in ages, sinister and smiling in a gold grill and an airbrushed jacket that says “Umma” — it’s like he’s meeting his extremist Christian doppelganger, someone who also believes he’s a weapon of god and retroactively justified in whatever he does. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother turns the world upside down, allowing the Houston skyline to descend from the sky like the heavens are crashing on everyone’s heads. But the real recalibration Latif has to do is far more personal, an act of mercy that’s also a surrender to the needs of those he loves, a feat as meaningful as any obeisance to God.

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