Mahershala Ali in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother Photograph: Jaclyn Martinez/Courtesy of Amazon View image in fullscreen Mahershala Ali in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother Photograph: Jaclyn Martinez/Courtesy of Amazon First look review Toronto film festival 2026 Review Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother review – Mahershala Ali is a grieving hitman in soulful thriller Toronto film festival: the two-time Oscar-winner is an unusual killer in a compelling mix of pulpy action and family drama
Prefer the Guardian on Google L atif, the solemn hitman played soulfully by Mahershala Ali , carries diapers in his kill kit. I can’t tell if that’s because they come in handy when soaking up pools of blood on the fly; or because at a moment’s notice the hitman has to switch over from his brutal occupation to daddy duties. Or perhaps it’s both for this contract killer who comes armed with a blade and baby wipes, who takes lives and nurtures them, whose life is composed of jarring and poetic contradictions, much like the movie he’s in.
Those contradictions are on full striking display in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’s opening moments, an explosive close-quarters brawl in a restroom, after which Latif uses the baby wipes to clean up the mess he made with that blade. It’s a lovely image, in a film filled with so many, cutting right through the tension within this character. It also feels like a wink to the audience from Ali and writer/director Bassam Tariq, a way for them to acknowledge right off the top the distracting mess made by that other Blade.
Tariq and Ali were collaborating on Marvel’s Blade reboot . Ali was announced to star as the vampire-slayer formerly played by Wesley Snipes all the way back in 2019. Tariq signed on to write and direct in 2021 but departed a year later. Ali recently revealed that, after being strung along for seven years in development, the reboot was not happening. It’s easy to assume that some of the ideas Tariq and Ali had for Blade made their way into this new collaboration, in which Ali gets to finally wield a blade and John Cho, of Harold and Kumar fame, stuns as a vampiric foe. The echoes and parallels are there but minimal, perhaps even coincidental.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is its own beautiful singular thing, partly a stylish and pulpy neo-western thriller about a father racked with guilt, navigating violence that comes heavy and uneasy, but first and foremost a drama about a family reconciling their Muslim faith with their actions, their environments and their grief.
Both Tariq and Ali are Muslims. The former’s debut, Mogul Mowgli, and his directing work on the Prime Video series Bait, both starring Riz Ahmed, were about young British-Pakistani men who internalize hostility towards their faith. In Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Tariq builds an even more nuanced portrait of faith around Ali, who seizes the rare opportunity to explore his religion onscreen.
Ali’s Latif, who once taught kids at prayer school, fashions himself as a righteous killer with a code, meting out justice to those who offend Islam. Getting paid for it is beside the point, he argues, when a supportive but critical Imam played by Giancarlo Esposito takes Latif to task.
As the film opens, when Latif is bashing that victim’s head against a bathroom sink and unceremoniously tying up his corpse, his own wife (Shakirah DeMesier) lies there dying, her body delicately cared for by their community in Houston (the…