‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’ Review – Bassam Tariq Quells Our Spiritual Ills With Blood [TIFF 2026]

Mahershala Ali stars as Latif in YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER, from Amazon MGM Studios. Photo Credit: Jaclyn Martinez © 2026 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.

What does religious devotion mean in the face of everyday life?

It feels like we’ve been seeking answers for ages, but the question feels especially fraught in our current sociopolitical landscape, where the morally reprehensible is often justified by way of devout readings of scripture or other religious texts. Of course, most foundational religious texts could never have conceived of highways, atomic bombs, and TikTok, and yet it’s terribly easy to fit them into modern contexts, even if those texts might not appreciate or condone the connection.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother puts additional rigor to the litmus test of religious devotion. Bassam Tariq’s film, which world-premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, follows Latif (Mahershala Ali) and his three children as they learn to live without their recently deceased mother. Besides being a grieving husband and father, Latif is a contract killer who spends months at a time away from his family on missions. Wracked with guilt and frazzled by the responsibilities of being a present father, Latif must search for breast milk for his newborn son because he wants to abide by cultural traditions. Latif’s quest to feed his child puts him in the crosshairs of potential foes who are similarly coming to grips with their faith and dubious activities, including pastor Hwan Yoon (John Cho) and pornographer Hatty (Abubakr Ali).

On the surface, Your Mother plays like a one-track-minded revenge thriller in the vein of John Wick and late-stage Liam Neeson movies. Latif has a clear objective with significant, tangible stakes: the fortification of his newborn’s health and the honoring of the cultural traditions that his wife intended to pass down to their children. It is the latter stake that both gives the film its thematic thrust and builds an intriguing universe for it to play within. Through the eyes of Latif and his daughter Fatiha (Adia), we see the full scope of their faith-based community. We see inside support groups, prayer sessions, and more, observing the infrastructure that helps people survive and thrive, especially in a world that either overlooks or undermines them. There is a grounded reverence in how Tariq frames them. You feel their importance to Latif and others, but he holds back from sheer deification.

That restraint is by design. It allows Tariq to properly critique the purported faith powering this and other systems. Your Mother openly challenges modern religion’s role in its characters’ lives and how uneasily it fits with the complexities and even the criminality of everyday life. Obviously, there is Latif, a practicing Muslim who is also a hitman and a father, someone who cleans his knife with a baby wipe. His profession puts him at odds with the leadership of his mosque, while his grief over losing his wife puts him at odds with God himself. (He says during her funeral service, “My Lord took her from me, and you expect me to bow for you?”) Latif’s quest to abide by his wife’s wishes doubles as his negotiation with his faith, whether he can abide by it and if he even wants to.

For Your Mother’s antagonists, the conflict is thornier. Hatty has outright rejected religion, and he has carved out a niche via Muslim porn performers. To him, religion is a farce, and his pornography taps directly into that putrid energy. Hatty’s work puts him in Hwan’s crosshairs, who has made it his life’s work to rid his community of sin. Hatty, with his pornography and its accusations of serving sex trafficking rings, gives Hwan a righteous cause. The only problem is that old adage about those without sin casting the first stone; it’s hard to do that when your stones are bullets, and your church was originally a strip club. (Hwan claims to have “liberated” it.)

A less skilled filmmaker would shape Hatty and Hwan into scythes to gut organized religion. What Tariq accomplishes in Your Mother is far more interesting and impressive. He allows those contradictions to exist, even to flourish, under the soft yet bold, high-contrast cinematography. When Hwan delivers his sermon in his mansion in the final act, surrounded by his gun-toting congregation, the meta-hypocrisy is undeniable. However, Tariq doesn’t suggest or hint that Hwan’s faith is false. If anything, he undercuts our assumptions of Hwan, Hatty, and even Latif, as they come to find the spiritually sublime in their final violent confrontation.

Also impressive about Your Mother is how it balances complex questions about spirituality and organized religion with high-octane action and humor. Much has been made of the resurrection of the canceled MCU film Blade, which would also have starred Mahershala Ali. From a purely technical standpoint, it’s easy to mourn what was lost based on what we see here. Tariq crafts some incredibly engaging fight scenes between Latif and his foes, keenly demonstrating the skills that make him both a formidable threat and, perhaps, a conduit for a fluid, metaphysical power. He folds cultural and spiritual markers into the film’s surprisingly deep comic well, having a well-intentioned, authentic laugh at the customs and traditions that shape Latif and his family’s world. (Qadir, Latif’s son, played by Jahleel Kamara, is an excellent delivery engine for these jokes.)

Alongside its interrogations of religion and its depiction of what the MCU lost with Blade, Your Mother is an unabashed star vehicle for Ali, one of Hollywood’s most quietly brilliant actors. By that nature, it is the two-time Oscar winner’s richest role yet, granting him space to convey the full spectrum of human emotions through the prism of grief. Unsurprisingly, Ali rises to the occasion. Whether Latif is cutting combatants down to size (figuratively and literally), chastising his children, grappling with not knowing them well enough to chastise them properly, or simply finding a moment to contend with his losses, Ali is in razor-sharp command. He is also surrounded by a great supporting cast, with John Cho playing wonderfully against type as the religious charlatan-adjacent Hwan, and Adia offering a grounded but rebellious spirit as Fatiha.

Your Mother is quite honest about our devotion to religion and its uneasy courtship with every other part of our lives. It offers us grace in our beliefs while openly challenging how we mold those beliefs around our actions, despite their objectionable nature. By a quirk of studio failure and subsequent intense collaboration, Tariq has crafted arguably one of the most spiritually attuned films of the year, even with all the commandments it breaks.

If that isn’t indicative of some kind of divine intervention, I don’t know what is.