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‘Unborn’ offers up more laughs than scares
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The Kabbalah. Hot college students. An abandoned mental institution. Gary Oldman. Jogging. Twins. Nazi scientists. A suicidal mother. A lost blue mitten.What do these things have in common? They’re all pieces in the convoluted mythology of “The Unborn.”
Best as one can tell, writer-director David S. Goyer’s film is a sort of Jewish version of “The Exorcist,” which is a vaguely novel concept. But Goyer, who wrote the “Blade” series and co-wrote “The Dark Knight,” makes things laughably more complicated than they needed to be.
Well there are some effective scares here, and you’ll
laugh at yourself afterward just for jumping and squealing like a little girl. But other images and pieces of dialogue are just as hilarious — and that probably wasn’t their intention.
Odette Yustman runs around in tight jeans, tank tops and boy shorts as Casey Beldon, a young woman being haunted by startling dreams, then a weird neighborhood boy, then hallucinatory images of insects, and finally a full-blown spiritual attack. It’s almost Bunuel-esque the way the images come at you in surreal, random fashion, especially when Casey finds a jumpy, old black-and-white film reel and projects it on the wall in her basement (of course), something that unsettles her further.
Only Oldman, who classes things up in his few scenes as Rabbi Sendak, can help Casey fend off the impending possession.
Meagan Good isn’t quite as helpful to Casey as the obligatory wisecracking best friend. This is especially true in the scene when the two visit a mysterious woman in an old-age home (Jane Alexander), who may have clues about both Casey’s mom’s suicide, the twin brother she never knew she had and images of intense little boys that keep popping up everywhere.
MOVIE REVIEW
“The Unborn”
Rated: PG-13 (intense sequences of violence and terror, disturbing images, thematic material and profanity including some sexual references)
Running time: 98 min.
GRADE: D
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