Rating: 4/5
Oh My Horror 2025 | 6/52 | Black Directors
Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain. The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old.
It’s evening in Eve’s Bayou in 1962. The Batistes, well-off descendants of the French aristocrats who founded the town, throw a house party where people dance, drink, and gossip. Eve Batiste walks around with a box of chocolates, offering them to her uncle Harry and her younger brother Poe. Their mother, Roz, watches the mischievous Eve affectionately. When Poe fills his mouth with them, Eve tells Poe they’re chocolate-covered bees. Their older sister, Cisely, stops them with Shakespeare and recruits them to hand our champagne.
Louis, their father, steps onto the dance floor with Matty Meraux, a family friend. After the song, Louis takes the drink tray from Cisely’s hands and puts it in Eve’s so he can dance with Cisely. Dejected, Cisely runs out to the carriage house, napping in a carriage. The sound of moans and clanking wakes her up. She sits up to see her father having sex with Matty.
Louis asks Matty to leave while he talks with Eve. Louis walks with Eve, dotting her with affection and attention through champagne-stained words. Roz finds the two talking and sends Eve upstairs to bed. Upstairs, while getting ready for bed, Eve breaks down and tells Cisely what she saw between Louis and Mrs. Meraux. Cisely refuses to believe it, telling Eve that Louis and Matty were sharing a joke and that Eve misinterpreted what she saw.
That night, Eve dreams of her uncle Harry dying. When she wakes up, she learns that it is true. The film follows Eve that summer through dreams and memories, secrets and premonitions, that show her a world much different than she thought it was.
The film explores the world of grief, secret-keeping, and pain that Black women carry, especially those who try to uphold the nuclear family. When the family comes apart, the women bear the burden of what is lost—less privileged than the men in their lives and afforded far fewer passes for any perceived slights or sins.
Though the film isn’t horror, it contains cinematic elements often reserved for the genre. Kasi Lemmons pulls a similar tone blend in The Caveman’s Valentine, though more effectively here.
Both Eve and her Aunt Mozelle have visions. The images are black-and-white montages, disparate elements that only add to a whole for those who know the truth. What we see doesn’t tell us the complete story, and what we recognize doesn’t get us any closer.
All I know is that most people's lives are a great disappointment to them, and no one leaves this earth without feeling terrible pain.
What a heartbreaking and compelling first feature.