'The Unborn' gives a chilling treat

I was in the mood for horror this weekend—as I think I will be for the rest of summer—so I was happy to see The Unborn was already showing. I was interested in it for three reasons: the trailer was creepy; it stars Odette Yusman, that pretty girl from Cloverfield; and Gary Oldman is in it. It turned out to be a fair choice—not unforgettable, given all the scary myths we Filipinos have gotten used to, but scary enough to have me covering my eyes for the first half, and comforting myself with a Snickers Almond bar and a Baby Ruth bar for the second half. (That’s what I get for watching horror movies alone!)

As can be surmised from the title, it’s about a ghost of a child that wasn’t born. It’s nothing new—we have our own tiyanak stories ourselves—but the film’s interesting take is that it delves into Jewish folklore and introduces the idea of a dybbuk into mainstream consciousness. A dybbuk is a dislocated soul of a dead person that possesses the bodies of people in its desperate search for a way to get back to earth after being denied the afterlife.

The Wikipedia entry explains it could have escaped Gehenna (which we translate as “hell”), or it could have been banned from it for sins that are unacceptable even in Gehenna, like suicide. It also says that “a soul that has not been able to fulfill its function in its lifetime is given another opportunity to do so in the form of a dybbuk. It will leave once it has accomplished its goal, sometimes after being helped.” In The Unborn, it’s just pure, creep-inducing evil. 

Yustman plays the role of Casey Beldon, just your ordinary stunningly beautiful and super-sexy health buff college student who has an amazingly handsome boyfriend who’d do anything to make her happy, including risk his life in a Jewish-Episcopalian exorcism.

She first senses that something is wrong in the form of a disturbing dream: She’s running down an isolated stretch of road when she sees a dark green glove on the ground. She picks it up, turns around, and sees a boy with a glove missing. The boy becomes a dog wearing a human mask. She follows it into the woods, finds the mask on the ground, and starts digging — only to find a fetus in a jar. Casey and her superstitious friend Romey (Meagan Good) translate it to mean some changes are afoot in her life. She can bet her life on it, too.

A series of hauntings take place, and Casey’s eye change color — a phenomenon that only happens in twins. She discovers she is, indeed, a twin, but that her brother died before being born. This family secret leads to the discovery of more family secrets — until she discovers a woman who holds the key to everything.

The Unborn starts off powerfully, picks up when Rabbi Sendak (Oldman) comes into the picture, and sort of slows down, as horror films are wont to do, when the entire story falls into place. It does, however, leave some powerful images: there’s the haunting dream that opens the film, the dog with the upside-down head as the dybbuk, and the frightening scene of a paralyzed man being possessed by the dislocated soul.

I’d say the film works because director David S. Goyer knows how to manipulate silent moments; the original score by Ramin Djawadi is evocative of the silence before the storm; and the cinematographer James Hawkinson gives viewers a good panorama of a chilling—both literally and figuratively — treat. They should have hired an Asian guy to do the special effects, though, as nothing does creepy-pale-and-sinister-looking-boy-in-the-mirror better than Asian horror.

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