Keith Uhlich on Mother of Tears

The House Next Door: "On the Circuit": Mother of Tears: "Both the body and the body politic are under attack in Mother of Tears: as Rome succumbs to Mater Lacrimarum's vampiric evil (she goes so far as to lap up the violence-strewn teardrops of her victims), Sarah finds herself the witness -- as a demon briefly glimpsed in the lens of a still-camera portends -- of more and more unsightly horrors. A zombie set aflame illuminates a digitally augmented path to Sarah's personal hell, a sequence capped off by an empowering moment of mother-daughter reconciliation/redemption. Sarah's unrefined ability to vanish into thin air is shown to be more of an exhaustive curse than an unchained blessing (it is here that Argento shows the up-close-and-personal price of being sight unseen). Dreams within dreams tease Sarah, at every possible turn, with the placating comforts of death -- by the time she reaches Mater Lacrimarum's haunted manor, which she tours in a single, glorious tracking shot, she walks with subdued defiance, as if anticipating and welcoming the inevitable."