The Good Mother

Albany, 2016. A star reporter who has stopped writing, a son shot dead in the street and a fentanyl epidemic running underneath it all. Those are the three pieces Miles Joris-Peyrafitte builds 'The Good Mother' from, his third film and a crime thriller shot under the title 'Mother's Milk', the street name for heroin cut with fentanyl. The idea came to him while talking about the opioid crisis on the set of 'As You Are', his 2016 debut.

Marissa Bennings (Hilary Swank) works as an editor at the Times Union and hasn't filed a story in a long while, leaning on drink since her husband died. In the middle of a newsroom meeting her son Toby (Jack Reynor), a city police officer, walks in to tell her that his brother Michael has been murdered. Michael was the son she had cut herself off from, hooked first on painkillers and then on heroin.

Paige (Olivia Cooke), Michael's pregnant girlfriend, turns up at the funeral, and Marissa, who blames her for her son's addiction, greets her with a slap. An awkward alliance comes out of it anyway. The two women start pulling at the thread themselves, from support groups and needle exchanges to the dead man's friends, with Ducky (Hopper Penn) as the first suspect, while Toby keeps telling them to leave the case to the police.

Joris-Peyrafitte grew up in Albany and shot there between June and July 2022, with the city almost a second lead: the real Times Union newsroom, the Empire State Plaza, the State Capitol, the Amtrak station at Rensselaer and a set built inside the old New Scotland Avenue Armory. He shares the script with Madison Harrison, who also plays Michael, and the score with Eric Slick; Charlotte Hornsby shot it.

Vertical Entertainment opened the film in American cinemas on 1 September 2023, where it took $322,484 from 423 screens on its first weekend, 19th at the box office, and finished its run on $503,378. It reached British viewers at the end of that month, and now streams here with a Prime Video subscription or rents on Apple TV. The press stayed cool: the twenty-two outlets collected on Movienco leave it at 47 out of 100, and only 22% of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are positive.

• Crime
• Drama
• Mystery