The Unborn was one of those movies that makes it tough to review. It wasn’t anything super fantastic, so you can’t sit back and do a rave review. But it wasn’t anything profoundly terrible, either, so it’s not like you can just throw the venom sprayer into overdrive and let your rage do the talking.
The plot is simple enough–it’s nothing worth writing home about but it’s not going to leave you wanting to throw things, either. Basically a girl discovers that she pulled a Rusty Venture back in the womb and killed and absorbed her twin brother. The key difference here is that, now, the twin brother has basically become something like a dybbuk, a kind of Hebrew demon, and he wants the crack at life that his elder sister so callously and unconsciously denied him back in the womb. And he’s going to take it, by whatever means necessary.
You might remember something similar happening in the movie The Dark Half–yes, Stephen King did The Unborn first, and when you get right down to it he did it BETTER, too. But he had Timothy Hutton involved in it, which gave him way more star leverage than The Unborn ever could have dreamed of. I suppose what’s keeping me from cheering for The Unborn is the sheer amount of derivative material located in this sucker. It’s a downright snoozefest, sometimes, because so much of this has been done before.
In fact, if you want to get technical about it, The Unborn was actually done in its entirety back in 1991, with a somewhat different script about an infertile couple who gets involved in an in-vitro program only to discover that the program was actually run by an insane doctor. Different, I know–too different to call the 2009 model a remake–but not PROFOUNDLY different. And that’s never a good sign.
I do, however, have a lot of good things to say about The Unborn. It’s creepy. Wow, is it ever creepy. It does creepy sublimely well, in fact–watching an eight-year-old boy pull a contortionist act and hiss at me from inside a medicine cabinet is one of those special experiences that’ll make you vaguely hesitant about pulling open your medicine cabinet the next morning. When a movie can generate the kind of experience that sticks with you, for any length of time, this deserves special mention. Looking at this kid out of the womb is downright alarming because it looks like the kid desperately needs some sun and a dentist.
Also special mention goes for taking the most OBSCURE Jewish demon possible and slapping it into the movie. It’s like they were checking a thesaurus or leafing through an occultic dictionary in study hall or something and pulled out “dybbuk”.
The rest of the movie is kind of blah overall, actually, with the actors turning in at least passable performances but a lot of the scary moments being deliberately telegraphed by the use of the wind-chime plot device (seems that whenever a dybbuk is around, wind chimes start clanging, so you can start jumping at shadows any time there’s a stiff breeze) and a lot of the force is lost. The ending, however, packs plenty of punch if not necessarily a whole lot of satisfaction, so take it or leave it as you like.
And that’s the best way to describe The Unborn. Take it or leave it as you like–I can’t specifically recommend it, but I definitely don’t find myself urged by my conscience to tell you to stay away, either. If you go see it–it’s still in theatres in some places, and coming soon for my European readers–you’ll likely not regret it. And these days, that’s good enough.
