Serial Mom

Beverly Suthpin is the ideal housewife, the perfect homemaker, and a model citizen of a small town in Maryland. Her house sparkles with cleanliness, and the white picket fence surrounding her lush lawn stands as a proud defensive wall, guarding the sacred flame of American suburbia. Beverly will do absolutely anything to protect her ideal family. And since committing a crime comes as naturally to her as cleaning, she kills quite often –whenever the good of the family requires it. When the media uncovers the case, the “serial mom” becomes a star and the object of fascination for all of America…

Serial Mom (first screened at the closing of the Cannes Film Festival in 1994) belongs to the mainstream chapter in the oeuvre of the “king of trash from Baltimore,” John Waters. After his iconoclastic satires on American normality, shot on the fringes of the underground (including Pink Flamingos, 1972), Waters began making films with Hollywood budgets and A-list stars. Kathleen Turner (Oscar-nominated for Peggy Sue Got Married [1987]) delivers a brilliant performance as Beverly, embodying the American Dream in all its seductive, ear-to-ear-grinning, ultimately deadly perfection…

[Michał Oleszczyk]