THE ASK | Omeleto

Three siblings confront their mother.


THE ASK is used with permission from C.D. Carpenter. Learn more at https://imdb.com/title/tt25041818.


Jenny is a lawyer preparing for an important case when she gets a phone call from her brother James. He tells her that their estranged mother, Lisa, wants to meet with Jenny, James and their sister Jesse. Jenny is against the idea, but James believes their mother could be sick or dying, so Jenny agrees.

When the siblings meet with their mother at her home, though, they get unexpected news. Their mother wants to adopt another child, and she wants her grown children to be her references. Her children, however, oppose the idea, letting forth a lifetime's worth of resentment and anger that is as brutal as it is cathartic.

Directed and written by C.D. Carpenter, this short family drama begins quietly, as a lawyer practices the statement she will give in court for work. She's at home, alone, talking in front of a mirror with a cigarette in her hand. Framed from behind, she is a dark figure surrounded by shadows, isolated in her surroundings. She takes a phone call from her brother, who gives her news about their mother Lisa and her desire to meet up with her children. The atmosphere is foreboding, from the shadowy, static cinematography to the ominous musical score that creeps into the storytelling, setting up an expectation that feels disquieting and edgy.

What unfurls is a masterfully written and performed scene of familial dysfunction, starting with the tense but seemingly polite sit-down dinner of KFC. The siblings hang back warily as their mother attempts to make conversation, trying to be solicitous and charming. Yet the sharp, observant dialogue reveals Lisa's underlying dismissiveness and judgment underneath the chit-chat, as well as her children's quiet but seething efforts to ignore the subtextual jabs. But that's nothing compared to the emotional mayhem unleashed when Lisa reveals why she's gathered her children together: she wants to adopt another child, and she wants Jenny, James and Jesse to be her references when the adoption agency calls.

This horrifies her children, all of whom have been economically but vividly characterized in a short amount of time. While James is a classic peace-making middle child, willing to entertain his mother, a skeptical and hostile Jenny is outraged at the idea, unleashing a litany of hurt and resentment at their childhood. The entire cast is excellent as the siblings and their mother hash out a lifetime's worth of grievances, particularly actor Gina Hecht at Lisa, who gives a raw and blistering performance as a narcissistic mother who can veer from victim to aggressor in the space of a minute. As she pleads her case, guilts her children, denies their trauma and her role in it and then finally begs them to give her what she wants, we can see just what her children have grown up with, showing how ages and arrangements may change in a family, but power dynamics often do not.

Unflinching, darkly funny and thoughtfully crafted, THE ASK goes to uncomfortably intimate lengths to immerse us in one mother's reckoning for years of dismissiveness, denial and emotional callousness -- pain she still inflicts on her children, even when they've grown. Yet it ends with a fragile sense of peace and acceptance, as the siblings realize that only they would ever understand what they have been through. They may not have their mother, and perhaps never will, but at least they have one another as family. For them, that will have to be enough.