Grace (2009)

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