Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 7, 2009, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Coming as it does at the end of an awards-film season full of Holocaust dramas, The Unborn’s release seems appropriately timed. Writer/director David S. Goyer’s entry in the possession-film stakes eschews the subgenre’s usual Catholic trappings in favor of a demon with its roots in both Jewish mythology and the WWII persecution of that religion.
Not that it demonstrates a particular sensitivity toward the subject; a line like “It has fallen to you to finish what began at Auschwitz” can’t help but give a viewer pause no matter what the context. And in the end, the Jewish elements are just window dressing on a film stocked with well-worn horror conventions, yet one that behaves like it’s the very first movie to feature a creepy kid, an elder in a nursing home who must be consulted for crucial dark information and a teenaged girl slowly creeping through a dimly lit house to check out that strange noise.
Said girl is Casey Beldon, played by Cloverfield’s Odette Yustman, occasionally clad only in a skimpy top and panties tight enough to show off her cloverfield. She’s got a loving, supportive boyfriend (Cam Gigandet, the bad vampire in Twilight), a best friend (Saw V’s Meagan Good) who supplies the requisite sassy wisecracks and a father (James Remar, underused) who conveniently goes on a long business trip just when things start to get really scary for Casey. It begins with an unsettling encounter involving a little boy she’s babysitting, and continues with her discovery that one of her eyes is changing color. At first, the explanation seems to have something to do with a stillborn twin that Casey previously knew nothing about, but a visit to an also heretofore unknown relative (classy veteran Jane Alexander, slumming with a Bela Lugosi accent) reveals the truth. Casey is being haunted by a dybbuk, which is traditionally the spirit of someone who sinned so severely in life that they cannot move on to the afterlife in death, but here is one of those cinematic demons that’s apparently capable of completely possessing anybody but the heroine, leaving some of its victims dead after vacating them but others still alive.
As Casey is tormented by visions that don’t have much logical connection to her specific torment but do look cool when excerpted in the trailer, Goyer and co. take the whole thing very seriously, piling on the portent in both visuals (James Hawkinson’s ominous lensing, including a few Shining-esque overhead shots, is the film’s strongest element) and sound (an insistent score by Ramin Djawadi). Yustman and her co-stars are earnest enough, but the straighter they and Goyer play the material, the more absurd its overused tropes come to feel. Especially disappointing is Gary Oldman as Rabbi Sendak, an expert on Jewish mysticism from whom Casey seeks help, and who eventually takes charge of her exorcism. The actor, who can almost always be counted on to infuse his roles with depth and vitality, feels uninspired here, as if encouraged to play only the solemn surfaces of the role without investing it with any wit, even when the material seems to cry out for it. (When Sendak discusses the Kaballah with Casey, they’ll likely be the only two people in the theater not thinking of Madonna.)
And so it goes as Sendak gathers the team required to help perform the ritual, including Idris Elba as an associate who works with inner-city kids, leading to a rather awkward moment of deep religious discussion on the bleachers of a basketball court. A few of the particulars of the setpiece in which Sendak et al. try to purge Casey of the dybbuk are distinctive, but like too much of The Unborn, the basics have been seen so many times before that it doesn’t carry much excitement or terror. This is particularly unfortunate when it comes to the Holocaust flashbacks, which could have added truly disturbing undertones to the story, but are perfunctory to the point where the inclusion of this great historical tragedy in this generic horror scenario seems rather exploitative.
In particular, the unpleasant resolution of the death-camp events is only referenced in a single line of dialogue and never shown, perhaps in the service of maintaining the PG-13 rating. And that’s not the only place where cuts have clearly been made; it’s unlikely that an actress on Carla Gugino’s level signed up for a role that only gives her about 30 seconds of screen time. At only 80 minutes plus credits, The Unborn has evidently been streamlined to its basic essentials, and it’s a shame that those essentials prove to be very basic indeed.
