Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother Review

What began as a seven-year development cycle for a Marvel Studios vampire-hunter movie ultimately rerouted two prominent creators toward independent filmmaking. After Mahershala Ali walked away from the stalled Blade project, he and director Bassam Tariq turned their shared creative energy toward a distinctively gritty American narrative.

From Marvel Studios Limbo to the Toronto International Film Festival

Mahershala Ali was announced to star as the daywalking vampire hunter back in 2019, with Bassam Tariq signing on to direct in 2021 before departing the project a year later. During pre-production, Tariq had moved his family to Atlanta and advanced work significantly, even collaborating with Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Bassam Tariq (“Mogul Mowgli”), who spent roughly a year and a half developing the Mahershala Ali-led movie before departing in 2022, was the first filmmaker on the project. And he has now confirmed one of the biggest rumors surrounding his abandoned take: yes, at least part of his “Blade” would have taken place in the 1920s. Speaking to TheWrap, Tariq revealed that pre-production had advanced considerably before everything came apart. Carter was already developing its period wardrobe. In fact, some of that work apparently survived in an unexpected place: Carter later brought unused costumes from “Blade” with her when she designed Ryan Coogler’s 1930s-set vampire blockbuster “Sinners.” Carter had previously confirmed that Marvel’s earlier version of “Blade” was set in the 1920s. Still, Tariq’s comments now confirm that the period setting belonged to the version he was preparing with Ali. Tariq also offered a candid, though hardly bitter, assessment of what it was like trying to direct inside the Marvel Studios machine. The system was cool, and we were a part of it, but you knew that there was somebody else that’s running this thing. You’re there on their time. It’s a different thing, Tariq said.

When the Marvel collaboration finally disintegrated, Ali and Tariq wasted little time redirecting their ambitions. 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.

A Devout Hitman’s Search for Survival in Rural Virginia

The film follows Latif, a devout Muslim contract killer and former Quran teacher who wields blades instead of guns. Played by Ali, Latif maintains strict personal rules that are violently tested when his wife Khadija (Shakirah DeMesier) suddenly dies. Her passing leaves him responsible for his rebellious teenage daughter Fatiha (Adia), his adolescent son Qadir (Jahleel Kamara), and a hungry infant daughter who doesn’t take well to formula.

Inspired partly by Tariq’s own experience trying to feed his newborn son while his wife was in the ICU, the narrative hinges on Latif’s frantic hunt for breast milk. 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.

In Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, Ali stars as Latif, a devout Muslim and contract killer who travels across rural Virginia in an effort to protect his three children following the death of his wife. He is confronted with a series of dangerous obstacles, including John Cho’s Hwan Yoon, a Korean American pastor and respected former soldier who is determined to destroy what he deems are great evils.

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Latif, the solemn hitman played soulfully by Mahershala Ali, carries diapers in his kill kit. I can’t tell if that’s because they come in handy when soaking up pools of blood on the fly; or because at a moment’s notice the hitman has to switch over from his brutal occupation to daddy duties. Or perhaps it’s both for this contract killer who comes armed with a blade and baby wipes, who takes lives and nurtures them, whose life is composed of jarring and poetic contradictions, much like the movie he’s in.

Mahershala Ali, actor

Ali noted that the script offered an opportunity to commit to intense physical work he had been yearning to perform on-screen. I think [the movie] spoke to me so deeply, Ali said at The Hollywood Reporter’s Studio at 1 Hotel during TIFF, presented by sponsor Canada Goose. “It offered up an opportunity to engage and commit to the type of difficult I want to commit to because this work is gonna be hard regardless — whether you’re in a good film or a bad film. [The film] was something that was very exciting to me. It asked all of us to go very deep emotionally, but it also checked sort of an action, movement, physicality box for me that I had been really yearning to really invest energy in.”

Navigating Faith, Family, and Moral Contradictions

You only live once,” filmmaker Bassam Tariq told IndieWire during a recent Zoom, alluding to the sentiment behind his departure from “Blade,” a Marvel Cinematic Universe film with two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali as the titular vampire hunter that never came to pass. Though the director said his decision to walk away from the project about the world’s most famous daywalker was “difficult,” out of its ashes came enough of a relationship with Ali to finally pitch him on Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, a script Tariq had been working on for years. He always had Ali in mind to star at Latif, a Muslim hitman struck by a sudden loss, desperate to now find a way to feed his youngest child. We saw the intersections of how we desire to operate and aspire to operate in the world, and I found a real kinship to him and a real connection, said the director. It felt like we started something and it was the one that got away. And there were a lot of other folks that I was considering but then I just felt like I got to go back to him because it just felt so right. That doesn’t mean he didn’t take some convincing to approach Ali, who he had only ever previously talked to about their Marvel project. ‘Blade’ was so full-on and it’s also inappropriate because we’re in a project where we want to give everything as much as we can. It was a very dedicated 100,000 percent conversation on that, he said of his previous interactions with the star. But “the community around us, the Muslim community of artists have been so central in this. Ramy [Youssef] was like, ‘You got

Those contradictions are on full striking display in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’s opening moments, an explosive close-quarters brawl in a restroom, after which Latif uses the baby wipes to clean up the mess he made with that blade. It’s a lovely image, in a film filled with so many, cutting right through the tension within this character. It also feels like a wink to the audience from Ali and writer/director Bassam Tariq, a way for them to acknowledge right off the top the distracting mess made by that other Blade.