The Unborn Review

Written by: jackalqueen   

Casey (Odette Yustman) is just your everyday beautiful teenager - haunted by the death of her mother but doing OK surrounded by her beautiful teen friends and boyfriend.  She is babysitting for a neighbour's children one night when one of them goes a bit 'demon child' hits her in the face with a mirror.  Her eye starts changing colour and during the course of the hospital tests, it comes out that she should have been a twin but the other baby died in the womb.  She starts seeing visions and thinks she is being haunted by the unborn twin.  Some investigation leads her to contact an old Jewish woman who refuses to speak to her at first but eventually admits to being her grandmother.  She explains about Nazi experiments on twins and how those experiments unleashed a dybbuk, or malicious spirit, which has haunted the family for generations, trying to be reborn.

She turns to a rabbi, played by Gary Oldman, who tries to perform an exorcism to rid her of the dybbuk, but things don't go quite according to plan  - although those of us who have seen any cinematic exorcism will have a fairly good idea of how things will go.  There is also a 'twist' at the end, to explain the dybbuk's sudden appearance, but it's fairly obvious from the start.

It has no scares at all, even the jump scares don't make you jump.  The CGI is quite poor in places, ie.  there are some things, like the old man with the contorted body, which looked fine when you saw them for a few seconds in the trailer but which looks silly when you see them for a whole scene.  It has no gore, no sex, no nudity, just a girl walking about in her underwear a few times.  The acting is OK but I expected more from Gary Oldman.  There are also some random characters added to the exorcism which felt forced to me - almost as if they felt obliged to throw a few different races into the mix to keep everyone happy - which is overly PC in a story based around Jewish folklore.

When I first saw the trailer for this I thought it looked great but it was a total let down in it's lack of scariness... and this is the kind of film which should have scared me shitless since I was meant to be a twin and my nephew was meant to be a twin.  The fact that it didn't make me even slightly uneasy shows you just how tame this is.  It's not that it's a bad film, it's that it had the potential to be so much better.

I would recommend watching it only if there is nothing else on and even then with a warning not to expect great things.