“Don’t underestimate the power of a mother: push me far enough and I’ll be the general of the army”: Siobhan Fallon Hogan on A Mother’s Fury

A familiar face on our screens for some time, in roles from Men in Black to Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built, Siobhan Fallon Hogan is now taking further creative agency in her career with A Mother’s Fury, a family drama turned revenge thriller she wrote, produced and starred in. It takes as its subject the little-discussed-on-screen phenomenon of “hazing”, the sometimes harmless but often brutal tradition of initiation rituals inflicted on US university students in order to join fraternities.

The film first introduces us to Hogan’s character as a slightly neurotic, foul-mouthed Irish Catholic mother who clearly is devoted to her children – if a bit suffocating, calling her eldest son every morning to help him rehearse his pledge script ahead of his fraternity initiation at uni. When the ritual takes a turn for the sinister, viewers might expect the mother to crumble, and for the film to take a deeper dive into social drama, but it instead swerves left, as she decides to take the injustice against her family (and many other families destroyed by hazing gone wrong) into her own hands. Hogan is brilliantly engaging as the unlikely protagonist, Barbara, at her best when encompassing an unrefined but tenacious force who bulldozes over society’s expectations of class and who can drive her own narrative. She plays wonderfully off Robert Patrick (Terminator 2) as her grumpy but loving husband, and the younger cast, who are more than put through the wringer to re-enact the worst of college student’s out-of-control behaviour. 

The Upcoming had a great chat with Hogan about producing, writing and starring in the film, how the idea of hazing going wrong at a university fraternity came to her in a kind of nightmare that she had (as a mother herself), and working alongside Patrick and an incredible younger cast. We also discussed how the film traverses social drama, dark comedy and thriller while tackling toxic masculinity, class and the not-to-be-underestimated wrath of a mother, as well as her experience of creating her own story and characters and her future projects.

Sarah Bradbury

A Mother’s Fury is released digitally on demand on 20^th June 2022.

Watch the trailer for A Mother’s Fury here: