Silly Unborn an Odious Afterbirth
Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman) has just learned she is a twin, her brother dying in the womb before the two of them were even born. She has learned this because strange things are suddenly happening to her, visions of gruesome horrors too unspeakable to talk about haunting her every waking moment. The young woman is convinced bad things are about to start happening to both her and her loved ones, the only rational thing left to do is to convince kindly Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman) to perform an exorcism.
Odette Yustman in Rogue Pictures' The Unborn
I’m not entirely sure what there is to say about writer and director David S. Goyer’s (The Invisible, Blade: Trinity) latest horror opus The Unborn. The film, a derivative Jewish take on The Exorcist that uses the specter of the Holocaust for cheap sensationalistic scares, is pretty much a mess start to finish. More so, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, its narrative so disjointed and haphazard its ultimate twist feels like a major unintentionally hysterical cheat.
On the other hand, the filmmaker has certainly taken numerous notes while sitting on the sidelines watching fellow directors like Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) and Alex Proyas (Dark City) helm screenplays he had a hand in. His film has visually elegant flair, and even if he’s overly infatuated with sweeping overhead helicopter pans overall his due diligence behind the camera helps him craft an innervating ocular menace that’s admittedly unsettling.
It doesn’t help, but it is at least still something positive a viewer can take away from having watched this mess all the way through. The movie plays like a somewhat skillfully constructed YouTube collage of The Sixth Sense, The Bad Seed, The Ring, The Grudge and the aforementioned The Exorcist, Goyer taking bits and pieces of those films all in order to craft a pretentious mishmash that never comes close to finding traction.
It was more or less impossible to tell if any of the actors in Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield were anything other than passable but that had more to do with the shooting style of the picture than it did with anything else. That said, I’d still never have guessed just how inexplicably empty Yustman would prove to be without a faux video camera shadowing her every move.
That’s exactly what she is here, the beautiful yet inert actress nothing more than a plastic mannequin doing her best to portray worries and fears that for some reason never materialize. Her face is a blank canvas searching for an honestly human emotional response, and as much as I wanted her to rise to the challenge and make this nothing into something worthwhile the woman just didn’t have the chops to accomplish it.
As for the rest of the cast, all of them are slumming and it’s clear they know it. Oldman, a fine actor who can make even the worst dialogue cackle like an electric current, sports a wavering accent that’s actually kind of silly, while Twilight baddie Cam Gigandet and Stomp the Yard hottie Meagan Goode go out of their way to try and make this wan material more exciting and suspenseful than it actually is. As for James Remar, Idris Elba and Jane Alexander, why they’re even here is a little beyond me, only the latter having scenes that can even slightly be construed as meaning anything close to relevant to the finished product.
There are a couple of solid scares (most notably a great one with a butcher knife I didn’t see coming), and Goyer thankfully never takes things so seriously they become unbearably pompous. It’s just all so nonsensical and stupid that the end result is downright stupefying, the whens, the whys and the hows so unimportant to the actual denouement watching the first 90-percent turns out to be nothing short of pointless.
On the plus side, The Unborn could end up being a great tool for teaching kids the value of abstinence or of using contraceptives during sex. After all, condoms are important, and maybe someday, if we’re lucky, they’ll come up with ones strong enough that even bad movies like this one can be shielded from impregnating theaters with their odious afterbirth.
Film Rating: ê1/2 (out of 4)
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