In 'The Unborn,' A Series Of Unblessed Events
It's a scream: Casey (Odette Yustman, right) and Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman) strike a blow for cross-cultural spiritual warfare in The Unborn.
The Unborn
- Director: David S. Goyer
- Genre: Horror
- Running Time: 88 minutes
Rated PG-13: Sequences of intense violence, language and some sexual references
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Mommy issues: Barto (Ethan Cutkosky) unleashes a long-simmering rage.
Mommy issues: Barto (Ethan Cutkosky) unleashes a long-simmering rage.
By any reasonable standard, The Unborn is a wildly ridiculous horror film — emphasis on the wild. But being reasonable has nothing to do with this irrational folly, and who needs standards when it comes to such deliriously over-the-top trash?
The prime mover of this spastic picture is the writer-director David S. Goyer, a canny genre scribe (Dark City, Batman Begins) whose superlative Blade franchise is the sine qua non of Afro-futuristic vampire fantasias.
I don't know what Goyer was smoking when he came up with the grab bag of gobbledygook in The Unborn, but I suspect he was reading Kafka, and took the man to heart when he wrote: "From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."
(And it's at this point that I warn you of spoilers to follow.)
Granted, there's little Kafkaesque about this story of a supple Chicagoan (Odette Yustman) beleaguered by incomprehensible weirdness (spooky kids, freaky dreams, potato bugs erupting out of cracked eggs).
But Goyer gets to that no-turning-back moment, and boy does he keep going. Here is a movie that starts as a ghost fable, morphs into a genetics nightmare about a revenge-bent twin, then reinvents itself entirely as a saga of Jewish folklore complete with flashbacks to occult Nazi experiments at Auschwitz. Ultimately, it will climax as a full-blown exorcism flick — with an ecumenical twist.
The Unborn opens with a dream sequence placing Casey (Yustman) on a deserted, wintry road where she encounters a creepy little boy, a dog wearing a mask, and a blue-eyed fetus slithering inside a glass jar. So far, so Freudian.
Casey calls up her Sassy Black Girlfriend (Meagan Good) to decode the dream, and will later rely on the help of a himbo boyfriend (Cam Gigandet), a mysterious Holocaust survivor (Jane Alexander) and an improbably open-minded rabbi (Gary Oldman).
Other than disrobing for some of the most gratuitous panty shots in recent cinema, Casey does little without help; The Unborn is predicated on the figure of the utterly helpless, passive heroine, a stock character who has otherwise gone out of vogue in horror. The movie is so totally committed to Casey's lack of autonomy on all fronts — biological, psychological, spiritual — that it's tempting to root around for some kind of female-disempowerment allegory.
Future academics of the genre can go to work on that in their time; The Unborn features more than enough psychosexual and sociocultural derangement to ensure it a place in the literature of B-level horror with grade-A subtext.
Clear enough for now, in its murky sort of way, is that Goyer is toying with the idea of irrationality — and that a whole lot of crazy has seeped into the execution of the film itself. Casey's slip-and-slide through half a dozen modes of fear, delusion and conspiracy gets reflected in the film's crazy-quilt of styles and blatant appropriations. Much here is derivative; some is startlingly intense and inventive.
All of it together, driven onward by unabashed genre excess, doesn't make for anything that makes much sense — but it does somehow add up to more than sum of its batty parts.
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