In a lot of ways, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother feels like a consolation prize. The second feature from director Bassam Tariq continues his vested interest in depicting the nuance of Muslim identities, which in 2020’s Mogul Mowgli saw Riz Ahmed as a rapper suddenly grappling with an autoimmune disease. But Your Mother wasn’t really meant to be Tariq’s sophomore effort: in 2021, the filmmaker was hired to direct a reboot of Blade, with Mahershala Ali set to star as the half-blood vampire hunter. A year later, Tariq exited the project due to significant production delays, and it’s hard not to see this latest effort as merely a means to an end for collaborating with Ali. But despite their shared Muslim background, and the film’s explicit focus on that community and its mores, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is less interested in outlining the specificities of each character’s relationship to the religion—faithful, faltering, or phony—than it is in incorporating the potential kills and thrills of a Blade movie that never came to fruition.
Ali stars as Latif, a Texan hired gun who has never fired a single shot. He only agrees to eliminate targets—never with a firearm—that he believes society would be objectively better without. In the film’s opening sequence, he struggles to pin down a skinhead before eventually slashing him with a large blade, which happens to be his weapon of choice. As he’s prepping the body for disposal, he gets a call: His wife, who must have been ill for some time, has died. He rushes home to be with his three children, realizing that his reign as a top assassin has to come to a permanent end. Latif is clearly inexperienced in the domestic realm; his eldest daughter Fatiha (rising actress Adia, a standout) has the unenviable role of simultaneously grieving her mother while becoming the woman of the house, taking on the added responsibility of raising her cheeky 10-year-old brother (Jahleel Kamara) and infant sister, whose supply of mother’s milk has just become finite. While Latif pensively grapples with his own demons, Fatiha desperately tries to get the baby to drink formula, becoming soaked in spit-up as she rejects every gulp.
So sets off the central quest of Your Mother, which finds the family traveling between mosques and milk banks in a futile attempt to secure breastmilk for the fussy infant. This brings Latif in contact with his Imam (Giancarlo Esposito), one of the few people who knows of his violent vocation and isn’t afraid to confront him about its moral consequences. It also reunites him with his brother-in-law (Tramell Tillman), a medical assistant who holds a grudge around Latif’s decision to bury his wife immediately instead of waiting an extra day so he could be present. When these two sources prove to be dead ends, Latif is forced to traverse more dangerous territory, where he runs into his murderous boss Mike (Laith Nakli), who, naturally, pressures him into one last hit before he can rest his blade for good. He has one day to target Kwan (a silver-toothed, underutilized John Cho), a cultlike Christian pastor who has it out for Mike’s nephew (comedic relief Abubakr Ali) due to his running of a “halal porn site.”
Your Mother should relish in these contradictions of faith, but it’s more interested in riffing on “The Gold Watch” segment of Pulp Fiction and the stoic resilience of John Wick. There are certainly some well-executed fight scenes—a particularly gnarly one involves petroleum jelly, shards of glass, and latex gloves—but when so much domestic tension is put on the table, it’s hard to find satisfaction in simply soaking up Latif’s skilled combat. One’s mind inevitably wanders as dark blood pools beneath those who stood in Latif’s way: What are the actual parameters of this man’s moral compass? What, exactly, distinguishes certain porn as “halal”? What does Kwan’s majority-male congregation gain from demonizing sexual content wholesale? Some of these questions feel more relevant to the eventual plot than others, but the lack of insight, or even curiosity, on the filmmaker’s part is frustrating nonetheless.
Issues of sex and gender are integral to Your Mother, but are never once properly interrogated. It feels downright biblical when the only person able to procure breastmilk ends up being a sex worker who previously made “halal jizz” fodder and now is a follower of Kwan’s sect. But after Latif tracks her down for another feeding, her presence falls away almost entirely, save for his son giddily remarking at how alluring he found a tattoo of a “red caboose on her titty.” Also errantly relegated to the background is Fatiha, who during one scene is seen browsing furry smut on her computer, which becomes a recurring point of humiliation. (“Hello Kitty and doggy style don’t mix,” Latif jests.) Considering that Latif’s children are clearly navigating their own sexual identities while he deals with a deadly feud that directly involves porn—with one faction seeing it as liberating after generations of repression, the other a corrupting force to the American male—it’s frustrating that the topic isn’t more concretely reflected upon, particularly because Tariq’s own identity directly intersects within these distinct religious and cultural perspectives.
The film’s title is lifted from an Islamic hadith about who deserves the best parts of ourselves. It’s made clear that Latif has very big shoes to fill in his children’s lives, but he’s definitely not doing anything on his own. Despite Fatiha becoming a literal lifesaver—on top of making bottles and babysitting—his wife, daughters, and the sex worker who aids them only seem to exist to give Latif something to fight for. The idea of a righteous man fighting dirty on behalf of the innocent is hardly new, but Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother could’ve felt fresh if it confronted its central taboos surrounding sex and gender—among Muslims, Texans, and men in general—instead of merely winking at their existence amid the flying blades and bullets.
Director: Bassam Tariq
Writer: Bassam Tariq
Starring: Mahershala Ali, John Cho, Giancarlo Esposito, Abubakr Ali, Tramell Tillman, Tiffany Boone, Laith Nakli
Release Date: September 25, 2026
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