Movie Review: The Unborn (2009)

When I saw the trailer for this, I thought it looked like a daft, trashy horror movie that would be fairly entertaining on a basic level. I caught Jonathan Ross’ review, and he gave the impression that it was a decent little horror movie that pushed all the right buttons. He lied.

This is a very lean horror movie, and it cuts right to the chase with the horror shenanigans. Right at the beginning the heroine has a creepy dream in which she is led to a buried fetus by a dog wearing a mask. She is then attacked by a child she is baby sitting, who says “Jumby wants to be born now”. Who is Jumby? What’s the beef with the kid? Do we care at this point? I did, at this point anyway. This is just the beginning of a series of increasingly bizarre events in which the central character, played by Odette Yustman, is haunted by an evil spirit.

Unfortunately it’s all downhill from here, as these bizarre events are uninspired and predictable. The Unborn also commits one of the cardinal sins of movie making: it uses the old trick of having a single character explain the entire plot in about two minutes. All the mystery, and all of my interest, died at that point. The reason my interest dwindled at that point wasn’t because of the lack of mystery, but because of the god-awful reason behind everything that was going on. It’s just really crap.

Without spoiling anything, there’s stuff involving mirrors (lots and lots of mirrors), dead babies, possession, exorcism, funny looking monsters and that kid at the start of the movie. Now, the kid didn’t make any sense. I was curious to see why he flipped out, to see why he was shining a mirror at a baby, and it isn’t explained at all. He reappears several times and there’s just not point to why it’s that particular character carrying out the actions he does.

There’s zero character development in The Unborn. The film follows the central character so closely that the others are largely forgettable. They all seem to exist purely to add their tuppence worth to the plot, and to die when they’ve served their purpose. Most of the cast is average to poor. Gary Oldman pops up for a short while as a Rabbi, and looks like he doesn’t give a tos

Ms Yustman is ok in the main role, and does an acceptable job of looking scared, but rather oddly her character doesn’t have much remorse whenever somebody close to her dies. She sheds a couple of tears, and then it’s on with the story. That really sums up The Unborn. It just plows ahead with the horror japes without real thought or explanation, except of course the scene where everything is revealed.

The whole movie is just incredibly functional and nothing more. The way it’s constructed, with the neverending use of establishing shots whenever a new scene starts, to the way the script ignores all of the peripheral characters, it’s Horror Film Making 101, 1979 Student Edition. It’s all so basic, it’s all so unoriginal, and it’s all so uninteresting.

It’s not a bad film, it’s just nothing special. Wait for TV.

Advertisement