The Cast And Crew of ‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’ on Pressure-Testing Religion

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother stands at the center of a critical but possibly overlooked social, political, and religious reckoning.

The film by Bassam Tariq stars Mahershala Ali as Latif, an assassin and grieving widower who must search for natural breast milk for his newborn daughter while navigating a fraught hidden criminal network. During his journey, Latif confronts not only his criminal activities and how they estranged him from his family, but also the cognitive dissonance required to be a devout Muslim, imparting his religious customs to his children now that their mother is gone. Latif finds that he is not alone in that confrontation, as everyone from pastor Hwan Yoon (John Cho) to pornographer Hatty (Abubakr Ali) dances around the contradictions of their religious devotion.

For Tariq, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother was a plum opportunity to interrogate religion. He explained in an interview with Geek Vibes Nation, “I’ve always had a very difficult relationship with religion, and I think all the characters are parts of me. Whether it’s Hatty, who’s really angry at the religious affectations and the smug look of religious people, or Fatiha, who feels suffocated and can’t feel like they can explore on their own [because] they’re also somebody watching them. I feel like I’m all of these people sometimes.”

The cast also felt a personal connection to their characters and to how they navigated religion in the film. Abubakr Ali had been looking “for the longest time” to fully explore a Muslim character as a Muslim actor. “Something had been happening for Muslim people and artists in America since 9/11,” Ali explained. “It was leading with a voice of ‘I’m just like you, I’m a good Muslim, I’m so kind, and we’re so similar.’ This was a movie that showed Muslims who are so deeply flawed and so far gone, and it forces the audience to still see them and care about them as people, and to grant them humanity for a lot of bad people in society. That meant a lot to me. There was something really transgressive and boundary-pushing within that.”

As a pornographer whose projects feature Muslim performers, Hatty deliberately challenges perceptions of sex within the Islamic faith, which was an interesting challenge for Ali. “Hattie pushes against Islam probably more than anyone in the movie,” Ali said. “He is, on every possible level, rejecting Islam. For me, that was what I was really interested in.”

He continued, “To be blunt, as much as my community, a Muslim community, wants to say that people like Hatty don’t exist, they just do. For me, it was exciting to explore the dark side of how people deal with faith, to humanize that, and to challenge my community to see these kinds of people and try to empathize and be present for them on some level, rather than reject.”

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother similarly examines Christianity through John Cho’s Hwan Yoon, who accuses Hatty of being a sex trafficker and intends to destroy him by any means, including those that run counter to Hwan’s faith. The film acknowledges the conflict, imploring audiences to ask whether Hwan is truly a man of God or if his religion is a shield for enacting his own judgments.

John Cho believes that Hwan believes in his moral compass, however faulty it may seem. “It was my choice, our choice, that he should be authentically believing these things in his search for the end, which is to eradicate sex trafficking,” Cho explained about Hwan’s motivations. “If that’s the most important thing, you can really do whatever you need to get there, and that’s the moral slippage.”

“This is just part and parcel of human beings trying, in an imperfect world with imperfect players, to apply God’s ideas as they interpret them,” he added. “It’s a miracle that it isn’t even messier than it already is.”

Examining that mess was another of Tariq’s motivations for creating Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. He started developing the film in Texas in 2023, a year after he left Blade, the canceled MCU film that he had been developing with Ali playing the vampire hunter. Tariq found himself grappling with many uncertainties, which gave him a strong sense of urgency to complete his film. He zeroed in on how people tended to turn to their faith to come to terms with those uncertainties, and how that can breed new difficulties.

“I think as people are being drawn to faith, they’re also becoming more self-righteous, and I found that to be very interesting,” Tariq said. “We feel this in these little universes that people live in, like the manosphere. [There are] these different communities [and] you end up going deeper into these holes, and you don’t really run into other people.”

With Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Tariq wanted to pull his characters out of their respective holes and find commonalities that might bridge some seemingly insurmountable gaps. “I think it’s through the collision of ideas that we actually start to be compassionate towards each other,” he explained. “How do we get these people who are on such different sides of the coin, who are actually very similar, to breathe the same air?”

Hwan and Latif are a perfect example. “Pastor Hwan and Latif are actually quite similar. And I get these two people to breathe the same air when they finally meet, and then you realize there’s a kind of kinship between them.”

The film’s final act demonstrates the possibility that Hwan and Latif can move beyond the contradictions in their relationship with God to reach a higher plane of understanding. There was a conduit for that arrival, which Tariq identifies as grace and also wanted to spotlight. “I think that’s the one thing that we’re all lacking right now for each other,” he said. “That’s an important part of being human that we’re losing right now.”

Grace ultimately loops back into Tariq’s examination of religion in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. He is clear-eyed about religion’s vices, such as its ability to be “weaponized in violence, as we see happening around the world constantly.” However, he does believe in the power and potential of faith.

“Religion can be an amazing tool for grace and redemption, for communities to come together for growth, and it can also humble us. It gives us a framework for humility.”