Director: Erik Skybak
Year: 2023
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
After spending time housesitting for her neighbors, a woman's realization that she’s pregnant is turned upside down when she starts experiencing a strange phenomenon after putting on a cursed ring the family takes drastic action to help save her and her baby from a supernatural force.
Review:
This was a pretty enjoyable and generally likable effort. One of the better factors here is the general build-up and atmosphere established here to bring about the impending sense of her condition. After initially showing the family relationship on the other side of the property which is fine enough with their squabbling siblings and carefree parenting making them seem relaxed but loving, the contrasting nature of what’s going on compared to her being alone at the same time is quite nice. While some of the material might be a bit overplayed, the setup provides enough for us to get a handle on the family so that when she starts to go through her own difficulties involving the rapidly deteriorating physical changes that start taking place.
These physical changes are another rather enjoyable factor here since they start to signal that something far more sinister is happening. The series of dreams and hallucinations offers quite a strong start to this with the idea of her confronting a troublesome ex and witnessing a series of bizarre scenes with the family eating themselves to no reaction. That leads into a series of impressive sequences that feature her body slowly transforming and turning into a demonic figure with spreading sores, an eerie discoloration that creates a highly eerie and chilling look to her, and a general flakiness to her skin that’s overall quite shocking to see play out. That sets the big finale in motion that works in some exorcism notions, a big battle with a cheesy demonic creature, and a nice heartwarming finale that concludes everything rather nicely for quite a lot to like about this one.
There are a few issues here that do bring this one down. The main issue here is the rather bizarre means of switching back and forth in the storyline between following her plight as the condition worsens and the interactions with the family next door. Some of this stuff feels quite draining on the suspense of her condition as we deal with the family lovingly taunting each other rather than focus on the pregnant girl as it’s all rather tiresome to keep getting these types of scenes as well as continuing to provide a rather overly familiar setup about their troublesome family dynamics. The other issue is a rather unnecessary and generally worthless stinger for a finale that makes no sense logically after what’s gone on before so it’s pretty pointless overall, but still worth bringing up to help hold this down.
Overview: ***.5/5
A fun enough effort that doesn’t have too much really wrong with it, there’s a lot to like here while only being let down by those few small issues to hold it down. Those who appreciate this kind of feature or are intrigued by it should give it a chance while only those that aren’t into this style should heed caution with it.
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