Thriller ‘Mom and Dad’ Explores Horrors of Parent-Child Relationships

Relationships between parents and their children can be particularly contentious at times, as we see in “Mom and Dad,” a horror thriller with dark comedy sprinkled in centered around a suburban family consisting of Brent (Nicolas Cage) and Kendall Ryan (Selma Blair) and their two children, rebellious teen Carly (Anne Winters) and mischievous young Josh (Zackary Arthur). While Brent yearns for his carefree days before the shackles of fatherhood took hold, Kendall struggles to repair the friendship with the daughter she has seemed to have lost to a cell phone, Facebook, and a boyfriend (Robert T. Cunningham). As stressful as all this is, no one is prepared when all of the parents in the country start to feel an urge to murder their children, the outcome of a possible terrorist attack involving some sort of chemical being released into the air turning the parental instinct to protect at all costs into something else entirely.

“[The script] was something super different that I had never seen before,” Winters told Entertainment Voice when asked what led her to do “Mom and Dad.” “[Writer/director] Brian [Taylor], when I talked to him, had a really great vision of what he wanted to do with it, and also, I wanted to play Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair’s daughter [laughs].”

As a man dealing with a mid-life crisis of sorts, Cage allows himself to really let loose here, making for plenty of entertaining moments as he grapples with the fact that being a parent has significantly changed his identity, including one scene involving a brutally failed attempt to put together a pool table. So much fun did the Oscar-winner have here that he recently told Variety that “Mom and Dad” was his favorite film he has done in the last decade.

“I definitely got close to Selma Blair a little bit more than Nic, just because I feel like Nic is just so unrelatable in the sense that I look up to him and I learned a lot from him,” said Winters. “I don’t know if we became best friends, but he showed me that you can do whatever you want and set the rules for your own person, and you can set yet your own bar of what you want to do with your character. You don’t have to conform to any person’s vision of your character but your own.”

Once the murderous spell takes hold of Brent and Kendall, things get intense, to say the least, as Carly and Josh find themselves having to fend off their own parents, coming up with clever ways to protect themselves, and vice versa. At one point, Carly is forced to even physically fight her own dear mother, which is more difficult that one would imagine, as Kendall is in top physical shape. Winters spilled the beans on what really goes down during the filming of a fight scene.

“Honestly, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but you end up kind of getting hurt no matter what, if you give it your all, no matter how choreographed something is, because you want it to look real, and to make it look real, you can’t make it that choreographed,” she revealed. “You have to just go for it. We definitely had some scraps and some bruises that were unexpected, but worth it.”

Despite the challenges, Winters’ experience here whet her appetite for more physically-involved roles.

“I loved running around and falling down,” she recalled. “I really loved doing my own stunts. Sometimes they don’t let you do your own stunts, because it’s not safe. But I loved falling and fighting and screaming and crying and just going crazy and not having time to think about something.”

Next up, Winters can be seen in the second season of “13 Reasons Why,” the controversial Netflix drama that deals with teen suicide.

“Her name is Chloe and she’s involved in a lot of drama,” she said of her character. “She’s getting in the middle of some relationships and stuff. I’m really curious to see what people think of her, because they could think one way about her, and then change over time. Her character has a really cool arc with twist and turns.”

Mom and Dad” opens Jan. 19 in select theaters, VOD and digital.