Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother Review - ign.com

Mahershala Ali joins his would-be Blade director as a devout sword-wielding assassin.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother arrives in theaters on September 25. This review is based on a screening from the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.

Once upon a time, Oscar-winning actor Mahershala Ali was meant to play slick vampire hunter Blade for Marvel Studios under Mogul Mowgli and Bait director Bassam Tariq. The project never materialized, but it led the Muslim actor-filmmaker pair to team up for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, a surprisingly thoughtful, action-tinged crime drama about a devout hit man trying to find breast milk for his infant daughter. This takes him through mosques and strip clubs alike in rural Virginia, laying out a visually and emotionally multifaceted journey across a heightened American landscape.

The result — born of Tariq’s own experience trying to feed his newborn son while his wife was in the ICU — beats with a lived emotional authenticity, while unfolding against a borderline satirical modern United States whose religious and cultural concerns inform the movie’s sprawling drama. Ali plays sword-wielding contract killer (and former Quran teacher) Latif, a man whose strict and sometimes paradoxical principles — like using blades but never guns, although the result is just as vicious — are challenged when his wife Khadija (Shakirah DeMesier) suddenly dies. This leaves him to care for his rebellious teenage daughter Fatiha (Adia), his delightfully brash adolescent son Qadir (Jahleel Kamara), and his hungry baby girl (who doesn’t take well to formula) by any means necessary.

The repetition of the film’s title is explained numerous times in voiceover as an Islamic hadith (a prophetic edict) about the central role of mothers in Muslim tradition; in a list of important figures in one’s life, they would occupy the top three spots. Before we ever meet the radiant Khadija in brief flashbacks, Latif is informed of her death by phone call during a darkly comedic scene where he’s just finished butchering a target before clumsily disposing of the corpse. Her absence looms large over the movie, forcing Latif to fill her enormous shoes in ways he may not be prepared for, as little hints of his personal code are doled out through dialogue. He kills Christian white supremacists and Islamic terrorists alike — anyone who poses a danger to innocent people or his community at large — though his vigilantism is largely backgrounded and, for better or worse, left to the imagination.

Awkward exchanges stemming from his conservative approach to women complicate his mission to feed his daughter, but his former associate Mike (Laith Nakli), an Arab American security specialist, is eager to help… for a price. Mike’s unruly nephew (a scummy Abubakr Ali) and former student of Latif’s has not only been rejected by their community for his salacious content creation, but has a target on his back owing to suspicions of pornography and human trafficking courtesy of Korean American pastor (and respected former soldier) Hwan Yoon, played by John Cho in a maniacally fun role. Should Latif take out the heavily guarded Hwan, his needs will be taken care of, but the pious assassin wants out of the game.

Tariq crafts a detailed simulacrum of modern America split by the pull of religion — Latif’s Islam, Hwan’s Evangelicalism, and the Mormonism of a kindly neighbor — but bound by the search for community, no matter how warped. As much as Hwan is satirized as a gun-toting extremist playing to a Confederate flag-waving fan base, the purity of his convictions makes him both sympathetic and utterly terrifying. This in turn makes for a powerful mirror for Latif, whose own hard-fought beliefs are forced to waver in the face of unusually difficult circumstances, playing out at great length through arguments and verbal dilemmas. The action is surprisingly scant, but its brief eruptions are intense, realistic, and soaked in both blood and remorse.