There’s a particular kind of horror film that doesn’t really announce itself as horror at first. It sidles up to you. It smells like memory. It simmers. Salt Along the Tongue, the second feature from writer-director Parish Malfitano, moves like that. It begins with grief—teenager Mattia, shattered after her mother’s sudden death, goes to live with her Aunt Carol, her mother’s identical twin. But almost immediately the film starts slipping into stranger waters, where family trauma, possession, and old superstitions bleed into each other.
What unfolds is part ghost story, part family psychodrama, part folk nightmare. Mattia begins to sense her mother has not entirely left, and through a series of uncanny domestic rituals—many of them involving food—the dead seem to reach back through the living. That may sound like familiar supernatural territory, but Malfitano is doing something much weirder, and much more intimate, than plot mechanics. This is a film interested in inherited wounds, in the ways mothers and daughters haunt one another, in how family secrets can feel almost theological.
I liked that it’s willing to get messy. Too much elevated horror now feels polished into submission, all architecture and no blood. This has a certain amount of mess in it. Contradictions. Wild impulses. Sometimes it lunges toward body horror, sometimes toward melodrama, sometimes toward something almost spiritual. It doesn’t always play by the rules, and I found that exhilarating.
And what a cast to carry something this slippery. The film centers on rising Western Sydney actress Laneikka Denne as Mattia, a teenager coming of age under the influence of two maternal forces: her mother Mina, played by Dina Panozzo, a humble fig jam maker whose presence lingers even beyond death, and Yuma, portrayed by Mayu Iwasaki, Mattia’s pregnant schoolteacher and close family friend, who offers a different kind of guidance as the world around her begins to fracture.
The performances are tuned to a strange emotional frequency where tenderness and dread coexist. Mattia gives the film a bruised center, grounding its more feverish turns in something vulnerable and raw, while the duality embodied here carries the film’s unnerving undercurrent. There’s a lived-in quality to these performances that keeps the film from floating off into abstraction. Even when things get surreal, the emotions stay recognizable.
What really got me, though, was the way Malfitano uses food. I don’t mean as decoration or metaphor in some obvious arthouse sense. I mean food becomes a living force in the movie. Meals feel charged. Cooking becomes a ritual. A kitchen can feel like a chapel one minute and a séance the next. I kept thinking how rare it is for a film to make domestic space feel this spiritually volatile. It’s intimate horror, almost tactile. You can smell this movie.
And visually, it has that dream-sick quality I’m always a sucker for. There are shades of Possession, a little Three Women, maybe even Don't Look Now flickering around the edges, but it never feels derivative. It feels personal. A little unruly, too, which I mean as praise. Some scenes seem to drift on instinct rather than logic, and the film is better for it. It trusts mood. It trusts unease.
Not everything lands perfectly. Some symbolic strands stay more suggestive than fully developed, and if you need hard narrative clarity, this may frustrate. But honestly, I didn’t care. The film isn’t trying to solve itself for you. It wants to work under the skin.
By the end, Salt Along the Tongue feels less like a film you watched than one you wandered through. Strange, sensual, haunted. A little possessed. Exactly my kind of cinema.
It arrives on U.S. video-on-demand on May 1st.
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Runtime: 113 mins
Director: Parish Malfitano
Writer: Parish Malfitano
Cast: Laneikka Denne; Dina Panozzo; Caroline Levien
Genre: Horror | Drama
Tagline:
Memorable Movie Quote: "We wanted to make something extra special."
Distributor: Yellow Veil Pictures
Official Site:
Release Date: May 1, 2026 - VOD
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date:
Synopsis: After her mother dies, Mattia moves in with her estranged aunt, her mother's identical twin. From beyond the grave, Mattia's mother possesses her daughter to protect her from a malevolent spirit, using food as a gateway.
