Release Date: September 25, 2026 limited; October 9 wider
Runtime: 111 minutes (1h 51m)
Rated: R – for violence and bloody images, language, and some sexual content
Production Companies: Orion Pictures, Two & Two Pictures, Amazon MGM
Producers: Bassam Tariq, Lucan Toh, Babak Anvari
Cinematography: Katelin Arizmendi
Editing: Cam McLauchlin
Music/Composer: Son Lux
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (2026)
Director & Writer: Bassam Tariq
Cast: Mahershala Ali (Latif), John Cho (Hwan Yoon), Giancarlo Esposito (Abdul Malik), Abubakr Ali (Hatty), Laith Nakli (Mike Mahmoudi), Adia (Fatiha), Jahleel Kamara (Qadir), Tiffany Boone (Fugazi), Tramell Tillman (Talib)
Somewhere along the way, the safest bet in Hollywood became the one that’s already been made. Sequels, reboots, franchise extensions and re-releases have become the most reliable path to success, and this year’s box office, crowded with re-releases, has made that clearer than ever. So when a film arrives with a concept as original and dense as this one, it’s staggering to consider what it took to dream it up, let alone pull it off.
There’s an irony behind how it came to exist. Writer-director Bassam Tariq and Mahershala Ali were once attached to Marvel’s long-stalled Blade reboot, and when that project fell apart, Tariq refused to waste the time or his leading man. Instead, he wrote the protagonist of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother with Ali specifically in mind.
That protagonist is Latif (Ali), a hitman who has devoted his life to Islam yet is just as devoted to violence, revenge, ideology and, above all, his own sense of righteousness.
The title, and the film’s opening, draw on a famous Hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad is asked who most deserves a person’s care and respect. His answer names the mother three times before it names the father. That framing pays off later, when Latif is thrown into an existential crisis and a role he never expected to fill wholeheartedly: the missing mother. His wife dies suddenly, not long after he finishes a job and wipes the blade he used with a diaper from his daughter’s bag. It’s a darkly funny detail, and it tells you exactly how these two lives have been colliding all along.
Tariq looks at the fallout from several angles, always keeping Latif at the center. The most prominent is how this loss redirects him toward his children. The film only implies that Latif has been absent because of his “occupation,” but we’re dropped headfirst into the aftermath of the most important person in his life dying and shaking his “composed” existence off its axis. I use that word loosely, considering his line of work.
His children each pull him in a different direction. Fatiha (Adia), his teenage daughter, is observant and perceptive, and with her mother gone and the two of them spending more time together, she starts noticing the deceptions her father has been living in. She becomes his lifeline for the everyday necessities he has no idea how to manage. Qadir (Jahleel Kamara), his younger son, is the playful one and the film’s comic relief, but he’s still essential to keeping Latif grounded as he tries to rebuild some sense of security for his family. And then there’s Aziza, the infant daughter, who becomes the engine of the entire film. With her mother gone and Aziza unable to tolerate formula, the story turns into a chase for breast milk wherever it can be found.
That’s a lot for one man to carry. Latif is grieving his wife, stepping into a fatherhood he was never consistently present for, trying to walk away from the hitman life, and scrambling to meet the bare minimum his infant daughter needs to survive. Within a matter of scenes the film turns chaotic, and it never lets up. The chain of events is absurd yet believable, and it reflects how religion can be interpreted, manipulated and exploited today. It also raises a sharper question about hypocrisy, and about the gap between the standards people claim to live by and how they actually behave.
That’s the real subject Tariq paints here: the sacred and the profane colliding, constantly, in the same space. They were never separate worlds to begin with.
The supporting characters sharpen that idea. Laith Nakli plays Mike Mahmoudi, Latif’s criminal employer, who wants him to handle a problem involving his nephew Hatty (Abubakr Ali). Hatty is a porn producer, an intentionally obnoxious figure who embodies a different strain of moral corruption, and he becomes a mirror for Latif. Latif kills in the name of righteousness, while Hatty profits from sex as he wrestles with his own religious identity. Both men are compromised. Things come to a head when Latif tries to leave the business, a decision driven largely by his new circumstances.
Then there’s Pastor Hwan Yoon (John Cho), the most outlandish figure of the bunch. He is a Korean-American Christian pastor and former soldier who believes his mother’s prayers pulled him back from death during a near-fatal moment in war, and he has built a movement around that belief. His faith has curdled into something radical, blending Christianity with guns, nationalism, violence and “purification.” He sees Hatty as the embodiment of the world’s moral rot, and he’s determined to cleanse that world by eliminating him.
Tariq plays with a staggering number of ideas here: religion, hypocrisy, motherhood, the role of the father, violence, revenge, mercy, grace, responsibility, community and forgiveness. It’s a lot to fit into one runtime, yet he manages it in a way that’s compelling, impactful and wholly original. Running through all of it are the questions the film keeps returning to. What does fatherhood look like when the mother is suddenly gone? What does Latif’s self-righteousness really say about him, and about how he justifies his killings? And how does that all feed into the film’s central theme of mercy?
The answers loop back to that opening Hadith. The repetition of “your mother” emphasizes the extraordinary burdens of motherhood: pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. But by the end, when the fourth answer arrives, the father, and the film’s opening question returns (“Who deserves the best of you?”), Latif has his epiphany. He has spent his whole life giving the best of himself to his work: to violence, to revenge, to ideology, to his own sense of righteousness. He finally understands that the people who deserve the best of him were never his targets or his convictions. They were his children, and the maternal role he’s been forced to take on is part of that responsibility.
That realization is what lifts Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother above a hitman thriller with a twist. In an era that keeps recycling what’s familiar, Tariq delivers something loud, strange, funny, brutal and tender, often within the same scene, and he trusts the audience to hold all of it at once. It’s a film about a man who spent his life believing he was righteous, and the lesson that being a good man starts at home, with the people who need you most.