Summary
Con Mum adheres to Netflix’s usual scam-doc formula to a fault, but the story it’s telling is earnestly tragic and very difficult not to be swayed by.
You probably know what to expect from a Netflix documentary titled Con Mum. And, for the most part, that’s what you get. The 90-minute film from Nick Green follows the usual scam-doc playbook to the letter, notable mainly for how it keeps getting more tragic right up until the very end.
Graham Hornigold hasn’t had it easy. Abuse, abandonment, and confusion characterized his life from childhood to adulthood, when he finally found a partner in his wife Heather and a calling in his pastry chef business (he’s the co-founder of Longboys Doughnuts and has appeared on MasterChef, among other things. You might even recognise him.) But one thing he didn’t have was a mother. At least, until he did.
This is the hook of Con Mum. Graham is contacted out of the blue by a woman named Dionne who claims to be his long-lost mother. Graham can’t believe his luck. The story that he was forcibly wrested from her care assuages some of that feeling of abandonment. And there’s more! Not only is his mother back, but she’s incredibly rich – like, “illegitimate child of the Sultan of Brunei” rich.
If you’re thinking this sounds like a pretty outlandish cover story, so did I. So, in fact, did Graham. But Dionne was remarkably convincing. She was endlessly on the phone to lawyers and bankers and business associates. She was immediately recognisable to the staff in five-star hotels. She was, by all accounts, sitting on a vast fortune of hundreds of millions of pounds, all of which she apparently wanted to sign over to Graham on account of having a mere six months to live.
Already, the trauma is beginning to layer atop itself. Graham lived his life yearning for the love of a mother, found it, and was then convinced he would have to say goodbye to it – to her – immediately. Fearing that pain, he reshaped his life to be about Dionne, following her from the hotel in Liverpool where they first met all the way to Zurich, where he opened a Swiss bank account on the assurance that no other financial institution could possibly accommodate the copious fortune he was about to inherit. He left Heather and their newborn son behind. On some level, I’m not sure he ever found his way back to them.
Graham Hornigold in Con Mum | Image via Netflix
It’s obvious from the title that Dionne isn’t being honest, but the depth of her deception is still quite shocking. She takes Graham for basically everything, coming up with increasingly elaborate excuses for why she can’t access her money in the short term but promising outsized remuneration down the line. She just needs a couple of grand to settle this bill, and a few more to go shopping with, and so on, and so forth. Before long, Graham and a few other well-chosen victims have shelled out hundreds of thousands of pounds to fund Dionne’s luxury lifestyle.
If it were anyone else, you’d probably be thinking Graham deserved it for falling for such an obvious ruse. But Con Mum relies on his inherent likeability. This seems like a fundamentally nice guy whose life has run him ragged, someone who saw an opportunity to gain the one thing he had always wanted – his mother – just when it seemed like that door had closed. The cynical theory would be to think he was solely focused on the money he stood to inherit, but you never really get that sense from him. His naivete is childlike. Dionne preyed on his most basic need to be loved and wanted. And she used it to destroy him.
This story is told in the usual manner of a Netflix documentary. The beats are familiar. The talking heads have appropriate gravitas. There are old photograph montages and audio recordings sprinkled in. The difference with Con Mum is that it reaches the point where a documentary like this would ordinarily see things turn around, and then just keeps going. Graham continues to lose more and more. Dionne keeps getting away with it. Even the obligatory postscripts reveal further injustices: that Dionne was never held to account for anything she did, and that Graham’s stable family unit, the one thing he had before his mother entered his life, couldn’t survive the strain. He doesn’t even get the mercy of finding out she’s not really his mother – it’s seemingly the only thing she didn’t lie about.
It’s almost impossible to quantify what Dionne took from Graham, and I came away from Con Mum feeling deeply sorry for him, which I suppose is the point. Him agreeing to this documentary – Dionne declined to contribute when asked for comment, unsurprisingly – feels like a last gasp effort to be heard and understood, and I sincerely hope that happens for him. Nothing else seems to go his way.
