Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother

OVERVIEW

In Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, a devout Muslim who also happens to be a hitman must rethink the life he has built when his wife suddenly dies, leaving him alone to care for their three children. For years, Latif (Mahershala Ali) seems to have figured out how to keep his violent profession separate from being a good Muslim, husband, and father. He follows a strict code that includes never using guns and only punishing those he believes deserve it, all while his wife Khadijah maintains order at home. The fragile balance collapses when, in the middle of a job, Latif receives a call telling him that she has died, and suddenly he finds himself facing challenges harder to solve than smashing someone’s head against a public bathroom sink: feeding his infant daughter, who can’t digest formula and needs real breast milk. The loss also sends him into a crisis of faith, while his boss, Mike (Laith Nakli), wants him to protect his nephew Haddy from Hwan Yoon (John Cho), a Christian extremist who brings Latif face to face with a disturbingly familiar version of his own moral code.

BACKGROUND

As strange as that search for breast milk might sound, it comes directly from director Bassam Tariq’s personal experience. After the birth of his son in 2014, Tariq’s wife became seriously ill, and their newborn would only drink breast milk, forcing Tariq to desperately search New York City for some. The experience ultimately led him to confront both his faith and his responsibilities as a father, and became the starting point for a script he wrote during the pandemic, already with Mahershala Ali in mind. That casting became possible when Tariq met the actor after being hired, in 2021, to direct the Oscar winner in the infamously troubled MCU production Blade. That film never materialized, but it at least brought the two together, which ultimately gave Ali a place to use his intense martial arts training.

THE REVIEW

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is an ambitious film, trying to bring together raw action, profound emotions, and far deeper questions than are usual for this kind of movie, all while using comedy as the connective tissue. The result is admirable but not always successful, impressive in moments but never entirely immersive.

Its biggest fault is failing to connect us with its lead character, a man broken by the loss of his wife, whom we never see, as he tries to find his way through a faith and moral code that we are never quite sure are what he needs until the very end. Ideally, in a movie surrounded by loss, the absence of the deceased should feel palpable throughout, but despite Ali’s soulful performance, that impact never feels as real as it should. His brother-in-law points out how irresponsible and absent Latif was toward the end of his wife’s life, introducing the much more interesting possibility that his grief is complicated by guilt. Yet the film spends considerably more time on his anger toward God without digging deeply enough into the tension between that crisis of faith and his knowledge that many of his regrets come from his own failures while she was alive.

The film also bites off more than it can chew with its thematic ambitions around faith and violence, raising complex questions that become increasingly difficult for Tariq to answer. If Latif believes violence can be justified by a righteous moral cause, why must that part of his life remain hidden from those closest to him, and what gives him the authority to decide who deserves punishment in the first place? Haddy (Abubakr Ali), the porn-producing nephew of Latif’s boss, becomes an interesting test of that logic: Latif may disapprove of everything he represents, but ultimately sees him as a spoiled brat in need of a good spanking, especially because he has known him since he was young. Hwan looks at the same kind of perceived immorality and reaches a much more violent conclusion. Both men have allowed faith to inform their personal moral codes, appointed themselves judges of those who violate them, and accepted violence as punishment. So what exactly separates them?

Unfortunately, the film makes the answer easy. Hwan is not simply another side of the same coin as Latif. He is a ruthless extremist who has clearly gone mad and now uses faith as a weapon. There is also an obvious contradiction in a film whose protagonist’s main arc is about leaving his old ways behind and reconnecting with his family. The problem is that to get there, Latif causes more deaths and leaves other families dealing with their own losses, something the film itself makes clear when what could have been a faceless goon mentions that his wife also has pumped milk waiting at home.

The film improves considerably when it embraces the action, which happens far less often than its premise might suggest. Ali has the physicality, and Tariq shoots these sequences with enough confidence to prove that he would have been more than capable of handling a Marvel blockbuster (perhaps that was the problem?). The choreography is intense without becoming excessive. The best moment has Latif breaking a mirror, and later gluing its shards onto his glove to give himself an advantage against a larger group of goons.

Mahershala Ali brings tremendous presence to the character and perfectly captures the grief, exhaustion, anger at God, and uncertainty running through Latif’s head. Yet the film keeps so much of his turmoil internal that the performance can sometimes feel almost too restrained. It lacks the emotional release that might have brought us closer to everything happening inside him, and without it, I struggled to truly connect with Latif’s arc.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is ambitious, thoughtful, but also frustratingly difficult to connect with. Like Latif himself, the film is pulled between faith, family, grief, and violence, trying to find a way for all of them to coexist. Tariq raises fascinating questions along the way, but the more he tries to reconcile them, the less convincing the answers become. Mahershala Ali gives the film a soulful center, but I was left admiring much of what it was trying to do without ever being fully drawn into it.

At a glance

2.5/5

“AMBITIOUS”

#19 of 30 in TIFF 2026 Movies RankedSee the ranking →

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