This childbirth thing is murder you know! Oh
John Chard
This childbirth thing is murder you know! Oh no, not another evil child horror film I hear you cry! Yet there’s something very fresh about Paul Solet’s movie…
This childbirth thing is murder you know!
Oh no, not another evil child horror film I hear you cry! Yet there’s something very fresh about Paul Solet’s movie, it’s deeply unsettling but emotionally complex, even gnawing away at our inner built capacities for empathy and sympathy.
Jordan Ladd plays the mother of the piece, hit with personal tragedy time and time again, her will is tested to the limit when a car crash strips her of her husband and renders the baby she is carrying as being a sure case of still born. But she’s determined to carry it to term, and when she literally wills the dead child alive, it responds in kind and becomes Grace, the miracle baby…
What follows is the disintegration of Ladd’s character and of the key characters around her. Meditations on grief are heavy but richly so, as is the nods to post-natal depression. The horror elements are strong, as baby Grace shows a thirst for something other than milk, and the slow-burn approach favoured by Solet pays off with a final quarter of heartbreaking devilment. Cast are dandy, especially a very committed Ladd, while other tech credits keep the film very much in the upper echelons of this sub-genre of horror. 8.5/10
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★ 5 / 10
Unique, weird, slow moving.
PeachyPies
The movie "Grace" is a disturbing one. The plot of the story is that a woman, Madeline (Jordan Ladd) and her husband, Michael (Stephen Park), have been trying…
The movie "Grace" is a disturbing one. The plot of the story is that a woman, Madeline (Jordan Ladd) and her husband, Michael (Stephen Park), have been trying to conceive unsuccessfully. They have been pregnant twice before, but she had miscarriages. This time they have been successful and everything seems completely fine. Everything is completely fine until there is a crash which is the result of the car airbag flying open at the complete wrong time. This accident, results in the death of Madeline's husband (which she seems completely unbothered about) and her unborn child. She decides to keep the baby inside her for the term, until finally she gives birth to a stillborn. It is quite a sad scene when the child is finally born and is not responding to anything. She sits with it begging for it not to leave her. The midwife, (who is a long term friend of Madeline) tells her she can't just wish for her baby to be alive. Whilst she is saying this sentence, the baby of course comes back to life and Madeline introduces baby Grace to the audience. Everything seems fine until Grace decides she doesn't like milk but has a thirst for blood, which is ironic knowing her mother is a vegan. Madeline tries to provide Grace with blood as much as she can either by purchasing fresh cow's meat or enduring the pain herself. This would be fine and life would go on, if it wasn't for her interfering mother-in-law, Vivian (Gabrielle Rose), and her doctor, Richard (Malcolm Stewart). Vivian interferes because she has a disturbing fetish to breast feed and Richard interferes because he has a disturbing habit to drink breast milk. Together they try to take baby Grace away from Madeline.
This film is not your typical horror film. It isn't scary, it doesn't make you jump and it doesn't get your adrenaline pumping. It's the opposite. It is very slow moving and not very exciting in the slightest. The only thing that keeps you hooked into the film is the fact that it is so very wrong. Another thing that makes the film so wrong is the ability to make you feel sorry for mother and child. This baby is feeding off blood and the mother will do anything to allow it. However awful this may be, the mother is so desperate to have a child and she still loves it unconditionally and therefore the audience feels the need to understand that what Madeline is doing for the child is completely acceptable.
This movie is different. It won't win any Oscars for acting, directing, cinematography or even special effects (baby Grace, at times, seems scarily weird, watch out for the close ups of the mouth), but it is a good film to watch if you want something unique. However, don't begin to watch the movie expecting anything special. If you take it one step at a time it will be enjoyable. The ending of the film (and I will say this, hopefully, without giving anything away), is possibly one of the strangest things I have ever seen. The last line and one of the last images with give you a "wtf, this is wrong," moment.
Overall, the concept of this film is different. It is a slow paced film, but isn't entirely boring. It comes under the category of horror, but isn't scary. It is more chilling. If you want something different to the blockbusters, watch it. If not, then don't.
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★ 6 / 10
Making horror of motherhood
bjdomeij
I can see why people would not like this movie. First of all, Paul Solet is making satire and horror of something that people hold sacred. The very love of a…
I can see why people would not like this movie. First of all, Paul Solet is making satire and horror of something that people hold sacred. The very love of a mother. This is embodied by two characters. The protagonist mother Madeline Matheson (Jordan Ladd) and her mother-in-law Vivian Matheson (Gabrielle Rose).
The movie starts with a soft-core sex scene in which Madeline seem extremely bored. We soon find out she's lesbian, so it is implied she did only get a husband to get pregnant. This is also implied by her lack of care when her husband dies. The scene where Madeline for over two minutes hugs and kisses what looks to be a baby corpse was disturbing. Later on in the movie she proves that she loves her baby no matter what.
After Vivian loses her son,Madeline's husband Michael (Stephen Park) in the car accident she becomes desperate to get hold of the baby, as she does not trust in Madeline's being-mother knowledge. She shows disturbing behavior, wanting her husband to breastfeed on her, seemingly because she wants to have a child, and probably can't have one because her biological clock has run out.
Overall this is a pretty decent horror though. It has a very disturbing atmosphere to it, probably at the cost of pace. It has some moments I felt a little ill (in a good way), because of the mood and atmosphere. The dialogs were cheap. The characters were overall a little boring. Madeline was luckily the most interesting and best played character. Vivian was overplayed by Gabrielle Rose. I didn't get a grip of the husband, nothing was lost to the audience when he died. But the thing is, cheap dialogs and poorly developed characters is not uncommon in the horror genre, as I said the movie is pretty decent.
I recommend this movie to everyone who likes the trailer, and are not bothered by a slow pace. The trailer is pretty much, what you see is what you get.
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I second the 1080p copy. Plz and thx!