WOW, that's a damn nice medicine cabinet!
***WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW.***
Summary:
The Unborn is a supernatural thriller that draws upon the legend of a dybbuk, a malevolent spirit that refuses to leave the human world and inhabits the body of a person. Protagonist Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman) is plagued by merciless dreams, visions of strange looking dogs, and an evil child with bright blue eyes. After being hit with a mirror by her neighbor's son, Casey's eyes begin to change color and she learns she had a twin brother who died in the womb. Casey begins to suspect that the spirit haunting her is the soul of her dead twin, being possessed by a dybbuk, wanting to be born so it can transfer to the world of the living. Casey meets a woman named Sofi, who is revealed to be her grandmother. Sofi explains that she had a twin brother who was killed in Nazi experiments in Auschwitz when they were both just children. The boy was brought back to life by a dybbuk who intended to use his body as a portal into the world of the living. Sofi killed her twin to stop the dybbuk, and now it haunts her family for revenge. Sofi refers Casey to Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman), who can perform a Jewish exorcism to remove the dybbuk. The exorcism is performed, but things go awry as the dybbuk tries to stop Rabbi Sendak from completing the ritual. The dybbuk disappears after the exorcism and the death of Casey's boyfriend. Soon afterward, Casey learns she is pregnant with twins.
Review:
The genre of a film more often than not reflects how the audience is going to react to it. If it's a comedy, people will laugh. If it's an action film, people will gasp. If it's a horror film, people will tend to scream and shit themselves. This makes me question whether Unborn is some kind of comedy/horror hybrid, as the audience (myself included) spent half the film laughing at some massive absurdity.
The film actually starts out very reassuringly. A silent, tense atmosphere shows the woman jogging down a road, until she comes across a glove in the road. Turning, she sees the freaky kid you'll have seen in the trailers staring at her silently. He then turns into a dog and runs off, and she follows, eventually coming across a mask. The slight absurdity and complete lack of sound gives off a unique feel, and it helps create a lot of tension for the audience since they don't know what the fuck's going on.
Of course, this is the best the film gets, as for the next 83 minutes you are treated to an over-use of jump shots and Odette Yustman's semi-naked arse. The plot of the film goes from being possibly a decent concept to plain retarded. At first, when it's the kid haunting her and you don't really know why, it's a decent film. Then, when you find out about her unborn twin, it still seems a decent idea. But then, when they decide to involve Josef Mengele and Auschwitz, you just utter a collective "wtf?". It's always those damn Nazis! The exorcism near the end is so standard that you don't feel anything, and everything that happens is predictable as fuck. The attempt at a cliffhanger/twist ending at the end is so stupid and anti-climactic that it makes the film seem even more pointless than it clearly already was, so by the end you realise you've wasted your money on a film that could probably be dreamt up by any 15 year old after watching The Exorcist 6 times with Microsoft Word open on his laptop.
Okay, so we've established that the plot's fucking stupid. But a film like this is clearly designed mainly to scare people, so how does it fare in that department? Well, i will not deny that a couple of parts made me jump, but that is only due to technical advantages in the cinema. The rushing of sound coupled with jump shouts could make a pile of dog shit zooming towards the screen scary, it isn't the point. When you take away these aspects, you're left with gay attempts at symbolism using cockroaches, some strange representation of Casey's mother holding a foetus in a jar (who needs some fucking dental work, or at least some Aquafresh) and a truly hilarious scene where an old guy from Sofi's retirement home does a 180 with his head and crawls through the halls on his hands and feet making noises that sound like the guy's choking. It's a wonder William Friedkin isn't kicking Goyer in the balls right now.
In closing, The Unborn is a shitty attempt at a horror movie that seems to rob ideas from various films and cobble them all together into one disorganised mess. Its plot is plain stupid, it's not scary except for the fact it uses more jump shots than real footage, and the characters are as standard and uninteresting as you can imagine.
- 0/5. Absolute crap.
