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Grace2009film

Director: Paul Solet
Year: 2009
Country: USA/Canada

*Warning: This review contains spoilers.*

Hype is a horror film’s worst enemy. I have had my finger on the pulse of Paul Solet’s auspicious debut since seeing the poster for the first time several months ago and have been chomping at the bit to see it. Solid reviews, including one that outright stated that “this is the film that the horror industry needs” (I’m paraphrasing of course), only served to whet my appetite even more. It’s success has been driven heavily by word-of-mouth support, and although beleaguered by a few negative reviews here and there, it boasts a 70% rating on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this writing, which is a solid effort for a freshman writer/director in any genre, let alone horror. Grace, unfortunately, fails to live up to the hype, bogged down by poorly written characters and gaping holes in logic that do nothing more than cast a misogynistic shadow over the film’s lumbering eighty-five minute run time.

Grace opens with Madeline and her husband Michael attempting to conceive. Madeline is a health-centric vegan at odds with her mother-in-law, a prominent judge who disagrees with her decision to see a midwife as opposed to a family doctor during her pregnancy. The midwife herself, Dr. Lang, is an old friend of Madeline’s, whom we learn once shared a romance with some time in the past. After a scare that almost cost her the baby, tragedy strikes as Madeline and Michael get into a car accident. Michael is killed and the unborn child dies in utero. Despite objections from her mother-in-law, the baby is carried to term with the assistance of Dr. Lang, only to reveal that the now aptly named Grace is alive. Although relieved, Madeline soon learns Grace isn’t like other babies. She’s hungry, and not for milk.

Grace manages to wear its concept on its blood-soaked sleeve, eschewing subtlety in favor of explicit attempts at shock value before devolving into a mess of unnecessary violence. Although possessing a solid concept, most of the film’s faults are centered around the poorly written characters and the lack of logic involved in their decisions. Jordan Ladd’s portrayal of Madeline lacks the emotion one might expect from the discovery that your resurrected newborn has an unquenchable thirst for blood, and instead rolls over and simply accepts it. She is incredibly stubborn, and although hints are given in the beginning, from the presence of flies around Grace, her unusual smell and her core body temperature measuring five degrees lower than normal, she refuses proper medical help, instead preferring to repeatedly call Dr. Lang and never reaching her.

Eventually, the sudden realization that her baby is essentially a monster is met with little to no resistance, ultimately driving the film into blood-soaked convention. Madeline will do anything to feed her baby, even kill. As a result she’s seen as weak-willed, exacerbated by her refusal to see a doctor, an act that is in of itself a contradiction of her desire to help her baby. Her emotions control her throughout the film, defying logic and common sense at the expense of her health and the health of Grace. She literally allows Grace to suck the life out of her, and therein lies a major fault of the film. Despite all of this happening to her, she is well aware of the danger this imposes, making several unsuccessful attempts to contact Dr. Lang for help. Because of this, we’re given a conflict of emotions. Madeline’s descent into madness is suitable for psychological horror, yet her awareness of the gravity of the situation implies she’s not as crazy as Solet would like us to believe, which becomes evident in the gruesome climax.

The remaining cast does little to alleviate the misogynistic undertones. Dr. Lang’s supposed lingering romantic love serves almost no purpose in the film as a whole, while her assistant is there to simply continue the direction the story takes leading up to the climax by lying to her, presumably due to jealousy of her lingering romantic interest in Madeline. It’s never explained, and quickly forgotten. Madeline’s mother-in-law desires to protect Grace, yet simply presumes she’s an unfit mother based entirely on her refusal to see a doctor and her absolute trust in the abilities of Dr. Lang. Not unreasonable by any stretch of the imagination, yet nothing more than a weak set up for the climax of the film. Grace is entirely too self-aware of the direction it’s heading, falling into moments of utter predictability before lapsing into nothing more than a blood-soaked exercise in violence, which is the one thing it did not need.

Solet’s excellent direction and appropriate use of sound to elevate tension do little alleviate the glaring holes in logic and irrational actions of the characters. The thematic elements of the story are suitable for psychological horror, yet Solet favored a more linear approach, preferring shock value over an intelligent portrayal of one woman’s descent into madness surrounding the incredible circumstances surrounding the birth of her child. In the end, Grace is nothing more than wasted potential, its success on the indie circuit a sign of the overwhelming power of word-of-mouth.