Adam O’Brien’s domestic thriller is claustrophobic, and that is an understatement. Part of the Glasgow Frightfest 2024 program, the movie seems to open with a woman and her husband moving into a new house or does it? In a film about trauma where time is cyclical, we orbit around the same problem with our traumatized mind: analyze, re-analyze never solve. It’s an uncomfortable watch because we never leave this person who clearly needs help. The question is not ‘what does she see?’ but rather ‘what doesn’t she see?’
Horror cinema often tackles issues which are important but still too unpleasant for mainstream discussions. “You were never meant to be a mother,” someone tells Meredith (Emily Hampshire) over the course of this story. The familiar old accusations are here you failed as womanhood itself because you lack ‘maternal instinct’. But there can be many forms of maternal instincts; lots of room in there for destruction.
In the wake of Still/Born (2017), Isabelle (2018) or The Kindred (2021), O’Brien operates within the thin borderlines between what one might call reality and what could turn out as hallucinations; however, he uses all these genre elements only so that they can give us an entirely new perspective on our common daily life which tends to become unbearable after some time anyway. She’s tired beyond measure like any other recent mother hardly even aware anymore where exactly her own body begins or ends while mechanically going through motions day after day without any real sense behind them. But that damn new house doesn’t help either: no familiar comforts anywhere near its walls covered by those strange shadows. Smoke alarm screeches somewhere upstairs while water drips somewhere else downstairs under ferociously blank-looking ceilings always demanding baby husband.
François Arnaud plays Jared; now, Jared is worried sick about both of them that is, he fears Meredith may be neglecting their son, having instead some unhealthy obsession with his possible older self (Christian Convery, who also brought unexpectedly much heart into Cocaine Bear). Why would any mother spend so many hours imagining how her boy might look like after these few years? Well, I guess it won’t take you long to figure out this one either once you’ve seen different, darker figure standing right behind her in the corridor but let’s just say knowing what will happen next doesn’t really make things easier.
What keeps everything together here though is Hampshire’s performance: multi-layered and wounded enough for us sometimes finding ourselves pushed away by Meredith like we could by anyone suffering mental illness yet still ultimately wanting nothing else than see her through this hoping against all odds that everything’s gonna turn out fine somehow. Because she is a typical slasher movie protagonist, only difference being no matter what happens everybody already knows she’ll never give up which actually makes it even sadder in the end.
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