Matriarch

 Laura (Jemima Rooper) is a hot mess. A successful career woman, sure, but she's struggling with bulimia, spends her days perpetually drunk, and is prone to partying her way through the night before heading into the office in a cocaine haze.

 She's not really having a good time, though. Her interactions with others are a weird mix of tentatively reaching out and then snapping at them whenever she's shown any kindness. Not hard to guess there's a lot of unresolved issues there.

 That lifestyle claims her not twenty minutes into the movie, and she collapses from a coke overdose after an all-night bender. As she lies dying on her bathroom floor, a black oil spill crawls from outside the frame and into her; It causes one truly horrifying nightmare, and then she wakes up on her sofa, as if nothing had happened.

 The next day she receives a call from Celia (Kate Dickie), her estranged mom, with whom she obviously has a strained relationship. Tired and confused, still reeling from her near-death experience, she quits her job - after some choice, unwarranted nastiness towards her (too-nice and understanding) boss - and heads out back home, somewhere in rural Scotland.

 As soon as she's crossed the threshold of her childhood home, the poisonous spite Laura's bottled up throughout the years overflows - her contempt and hate for her mom are tangible. Celia, meanwhile, takes it in stride and is all conciliatory, manic cheerfulness, desperately trying to paper over what's clearly years of bad parenting.

 And there's clearly something odd going on at the village. There's weird charms hanging from the local trees, people look a lot younger than they should, and there's clearly some ulterior motive behind Celia's newfound interest in her daughter - her attempts to placate Laura are transparently - hilariously - self-serving, and it's easy to see she can't stand her. Best of all, Laura is so self-absorbed (and, to be fair, caught up in some pretty out there weirdness) that she's almost oblivious to it.

 There's also the matter of the black ooze that keeps welling up from Laura's flesh... and Celia's.

 Matriarch is an American-produced slice of very British folk horror - a particularly indecent take on it with a wicked streak of humour. Explanations are produced eventually, leading to a satisfying, bizarre finale that features some nice cosmic horror-adjacent imagery that's pretty impressive for a low-budget production like this.

 Writer/director Ben Steiner keeps things simmering nicely until they boil over, the dialog is sharp, and the actors seem to be having a blast portraying two extremely toxic people - one of them because she doesn't know any better, the other one irredeemable. I wasn't initially convinced by Rooper's acting, which felt too mannered, but it grew on me - it fits her character well. Dickie is a delight, and she gets the lion's share of the laughs, but both have strong scenes and a very good sense of comedic timing. Which is an odd thing to praise in a horror movie, but there you go.

 In case I've given the wrong impression - it keeps a tight enough leash on the mood, and has enough effectively disturbing imagery that it never really tips over into comedy - or even horror comedy territory. I'd describe it as a female-focused companion piece to that other weird folk horror movie from 2022, Men; It's not scary, but it can be unsettling - there's some pretty disgusting body horror, a cool story served with a thick helping of atmospheric uncanniness, sex-tinged weirdness and the sort of behaviour from both leads that would curdle milk and make monocles shatter violently. All good fun.

 All that plus a sex druid and something I can only describe as Cunthulhu. What else do you need?