LUCIDMEDIA

Toronto After Dark – Grace

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Tuesday, 25 August 2009 09:04

A First Look at Grace By Adam A. Donaldson

It went by in a flash, and so the Toronto After Dark Film Festival closes for another year with its final screening, Grace. Grace was one of the selections at this past January’s Sundance, and apparently was so potent a horror that people fainted in the aisles. Frankly, I haven’t heard about a reaction like that to a horror movie since The Exorcist, so already Grace has got some favourable comparisons working in for it. It was a nearly sold out audience for this final screening, and outside the Bloor waiting to get in, people were tabulating their reviews of the festival as a whole. Some believed that this year’s line-up was weaker than previous slates, and others bemoaned that fact of the date change from October to August, a decidedly unspooky time atmosphere-wise (assuming you discount the end of the world thunderstorm the previous night).

Would Grace change those minds and put this year’s festival over the top? Perhaps, certainly the buzz was working for this movie from first time filmmaker Paul Solet. Like The Exorcist, the subtext is demon spawn, or in this case the term zombie baby would be a bit more precise. The best horrors stem from some unconscious fear that typically comes from circumstances uncontrollable: your dreams, isolation in the middle of nowhere, attack from outside forces. A thousand and one things can go wrong in the child-birthing process, even in spite of modern medicine. So in the spirit of the impossible is possible, we get Jordan Ladd as a mom doing her best for her baby girl named Grace.

As a movie Grace could be read on a number of levels. It could be seen as a typical mother that’d do anything for her kid melodrama, except in this instance the kid is literally blood thirsty. The cynical among us could read this as a plebiscite against veganism. Madeline, the mother played by Ladd, is a devoted vegan and advocate for alternative medicine, pointedly refusing her mother-in-laws demands that she see a “real doctor,” and instead seeing a midwife. One could also note the hypocrisy of throwing your no meat agenda and principles out the window when your baby is a zombie with a taste for flesh, but we’ll chalk that one up to a mother doing anything for her kid.

The ring-wing minded out there could also read a subtext about family values into Grace. The opening scene shows Madeline making love to her husband though she’s clearly not into it. It’s inferred that perhaps she’s merely looking to get pregnant, and later when it’s further inferred that Madeline and the midwife (played by Samantha Ferris) had a relationship, and upon seeing the rather staid relationship between her and her husband Michael (Stephen Park), it seems more than a forgone conclusion. A late night hospital visit ends in a car crash that kills Michael and seemingly kills Madeline’s unborn child. Unwilling to let go having endured two previous miscarriages, she delivers the baby, but it seemingly returns to life once “born.”

The creepiness of the movie comes from the fact that everyone can identify with a new mother’s worry that something might be wrong with their baby. Maybe not blood-drinking zombie wrong, but so much of a pregnancy is out of a mother’s direct control and left purely up to biology, that it’s an easy push to go from concerned to frightened. But beyond just the baby’s health, there are all those other factors to contend with: diet, nutrition, care, the in-laws… Granted, most in-laws aren’t as patently creepy as the Mathesons, including the perennially lactating Vivian (played with the right amount of ick by Gabrielle Rose), but they’re always there with unwarranted advice regardless. Like Rosemary’s Baby, control and biology are two themes that resonate in Grace, and it’s the implications of these things more than blood and guts that will get you frightened. Especially if you have a kid, are having a kid, or have ever though about having kids.

Overall, Solet creates an excellent tension and foreboding, while the script, for the most part, is unpredictable and entertaining. The film’s final minutes are where things come apart as the various characters and their motivations are forced into some kind of cohesive final narrative. Without giving away the ending let me say that certain events confused me because when someone is hit on the head repeatedly by a blunt force object, they don’t usually get up, walk away and are hunky dory six months after the fact. But if the conclusions unsatisfying, it’s only because Solet masterfully sets up and executes his thriller that figuring out how to end it was almost a secondary consideration. Wildly creepy and technically well-executed, Grace delivers. Pun intended.

A Second Look at Grace By Andrew Skinner

I generally try to avoid the maternity ward of a hospital even though they are often places of hope and good news, unfortunately with this movie that was not to be the case. Director Paul Solet, as he admits, seeks to offend sensibilities and shock by breaking social tastes, while not understanding that hitting a few shockers in the pursuit of making a good, entertaining, horror film is normal. There’s good taste in horror movies too, you know, and if you don’t have the stomach for baby bottle blood and nipple biting, you are no less a horror fan. The thumping drone music by Austin Wintory (Live Evil) is effective but wasted on this nauseous spectacle. At the end of the labour pains for Grace there is no relief from the anaemic sickness and copious amounts of womb spewing blood.

Madeline (Jordan Ladd) who has had difficulty conceiving for many years finally manages to get pregnant. She wants a baby so badly that she will do anything to get it, including get married to a man! She seeks the assistance of a midwife named Samantha [Samantha Ferris] who happens to be her former lover. But her mother-in-law (Gabrielle Rose) insists that she use a conventional hospital almost to the point of helping force the birth before it’s time. The complications to this pregnancy could be coming from anywhere, like the family’s antiseptic paranoia about everything, and avoidance of red meat. They are depriving the baby of the natural love and nutrients for it to come out of the womb healthy, so we are to believe. Guess what! It doesn’t.

Postpartum, no amount of effort is going to save this little jaundiced fellow and Madeline flatly refuses it from doctors. Looking at these characters and their inhuman domiciles of sterile narcissism it would be surprising if the child grew up ‘normal’ anyway. There is something unsound about the entire miracle of this woman’s pregnancy. Everything from her lack of real affection for her husband Michael (Stephen Park), to her and her husband’s obsessing about cleanliness and vegetarianism –viewing films of animal cruelty and flesh close ups in the kitchen. After almost suffering a miscarriage she gives birth without the assistance of forceps or vacuum extractor in a way that probably killed a lot of women in the past. The baby does survive when maybe it shouldn’t have. Needless to say it does not have a healthy appetite. But Madeline simply says “She needs special food”.

I have to wonder what the director is really getting at. Is he criticizing vegetarianism and lesbianism and modern life or the other way around? Either way it’s a hell of a new world for the baby. Somehow or other what they may think are their best intentions they have not created a fertile world. If there are some interesting ideas back behind here somewhere they are not brought forward. Such as that may be, the director has made a movie on “Eraserhead” a latex baby prop, and whether there are many scenes with a real baby or not, the crying is not going to ever turn out entertainment.

The focus on cutting and blood and all around motherhood is simply insidious and not enjoyable. It has nothing of the supernatural foreboding and suggestiveness of Roman Polanski’s 1968 Rosemary’s Baby, but is simply shock horror that exchanges milk for blood. Sure the acting and film construction are good but so what! Go set up shop in a slaughter house that doesn’t mean I’m going to want to watch it. Breaking taste taboos does not automatically make a good horror movie and I’m saying this as a critic who liked Hostel! I just can’t go with baby vampires.