A Thomas Bess review of:
Directed By: Paul Solet
Starring: Jordan Ladd, Samantha Ferris, Gabrielle Rose, Stephen Park
Run Time: 85 extremely disconcerting minutes.
Not surprisingly, one of the major tenets of horror fiction involves a preoccupation with death. What happens when we die, what happens after we die, trying to avoid the inevitability of dying and all manner of variants in between. Birth, on the other hand, doesn’t get a lot of play. I guess because it’s the beginning of life, folks don’t see a lot of opportunity for fear. I mean, when was the last time anyone was terrified of a newborn (the prospect of changing diapers or watching a Wiggles video does not count)? Truth be told, I really didn’t consider the concept all the scary either, at least not until late last night when I popped in Paul Solet’s Grace. After sitting through this nasty little slow burn of a flick, I’m changing my position. Birth is infinitely more scary than death. They’re both equally violent (I‘m speaking in a cinematic sense, I fully understand folks go quietly into the hereafter in the real world), but when you die, everything’s over. Birth though, that’s just the beginning.
Plot is pretty straight forward. Our heroine is Madeline Matheson (Ladd), a happy, twenty-something mother to be who’s decided to forego the craziness of a standard hospital birth in favor of a more traditional midwife, a fact that worries her husband (Park) and damn near infuriates her meddling mother in law (Rose). Despite these minor tensions, things are going very well for the Matheson’s until one fateful evening when a car accident leaves Maddy’s husband dead and her unborn child dead in her womb. Against everyone’s advice (including her midwife Patricia Lang, played by Ferris) she decides to carry the baby to term. When Madeline does go into labor, the baby is delivered into the world and holy shit, she’s alive. Baby Grace is perfectly normal upon first glace — Lang wants Maddy to take the infant to a real hospital to have some tests run, but mom has no need to understand her “miracle” so she takes Grace home. Not long after, things start to get weird. Flies show up en masse in the baby’s room, her temperature is 93.3 and here’s the kicker: formula won’t do. As Madeline discovers, Grace has a taste for blood and the rest of the film delves into just what sort of lengths she’ll go to in order to raise her daughter.
What’s good? Man, where to start? The cast is small but they all do great work, you’ll actually feel things for these characters (sympathy, revulsion and everything in between) a quality that is sadly missing in a lot of horror flicks these days. Ladd is especially convincing as an otherwise perfect mother who’s faced with the gruesome quandary of how to keep Grace fed without killing herself or others in the process. As the over-protective mother in law, Gabrielle Rose has some of the best, most disturbing scenes in the movie. It’s obvious she wants to do right by the baby, but her ignorance of Grace’s unique condition ultimately sets in motion a chain of events that lead to very bad things. From a strictly visual standpoint it’s a gorgeous looking film that manages to get an amazing amount of tension out of seemingly innocuous situations — the gurgle from a baby monitor or the testing of old medical supplies come to mind. And the scene of Grace’s actual birth is something to behold. I didn’t quite realize I had been holding my breath until I let loose with an exhalation at almost the same time as Madeline. Creepy. On the gore front, there’s not a lot and what is there comes in the last act, but it’s done very effectively. If watching Maddy trying to fill Grace’s bottle with her special “formula” doesn’t give you a shiver, you’re beyond my help.
What’s not good? In this dude’s opinion, almost nothing, at least from a narrative standpoint. This might not be an issue for those of you with better speakers than I, but I discovered that Grace is one of those movies with the annoying habit of going from really, really quiet to really goddamned loud in the span of a few frames. It certainly didn’t make me enjoy the story any less, but constantly fiddling with the remote control was irksome. As for the movie itself, the last act is great up until the very end. Not a Haute Tension caliber fumble, but it seemed like a subplot that really hadn’t been given much attention earlier suddenly came to the fore and it left me going “hhhmmmmh”. That said, the last shot makes up for any shortcomings with two little words: “She’s teething.”
When I started hammering this review out, I pulled up Grace’s IMDB page and was shocked to see the movie only had a rating of 5.9 out of 10. Now I won’t bust out arrogant little phrases like the average moviegoer just won’t “get it” but I will say that this is most definitely a slow burn story that relies more on the implications of what is going on than straight up splatter to deliver its scares. So if your definition of horror involves nothing more than shaky cam, music video style editing and axes in heads, stay away from this baby because you will most likely be bored out of your skull. But to those of you who relish letting your imagination loose to mull over the details and ideas presented, get your hands on Grace as quickly as possible. Nothing released in the multiplexes this year even comes close to matching the shivers provided by this flick.
Til next time, always remember that the calls are coming from inside the house.
Tom Bess has sideburns that are so big they might be considered a beard shaving accident from afar. He blames his current mental state on Stephen King, Mike Nelson, Seth McFarlane and Vince McMahon but bears them no ill will. He passes his time writing movie reviews, but will flee the interwebs forever as soon as Allison Mack starts returning his calls.
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