Grace

Madeline (Jordan Ladd) is determined to have a baby. Dead set you might say. Having already suffered through two miscarriages, this time is going to be better. After an accident takes her husband and leaves Madeline with another lifeless child in her womb, she decides to go through with the birth as planned anyway.

This is when it all gets very strange, and terrifying.

GRACE is a cold, slow-building shocker with an overarching sense of bleakness and imminent, inescapable doom. We know while watching it unfold that it can't possibly end well.

It's all topped off with a wonderfully macabre twist...

TO MOM.... These are the last words to appear on the screen after end credits for GRACE. (You see, sometimes it pays to watch the credits to the very end!) Now if GRACE had been MY baby, (We're speaking metaphorically here, of course!) The absolute LAST person on earth I would have dedicated this film to would have been MY MOM! Well, that is unless my goal were getting her to disown me! Bizarrely quirky, Uber-creepy and I would say, definitely old-school film-making, but with an extremely dark fresh twist. The psychological equivalent of walking on eggshells inside your brain while running jagged fingernails across your mind's blackboard!

...And it's a Canadian flick!

Reviews here abound with Film "A" meets Movie "B" examples. Here is my take to try a give you sense of the GRACE's impact: Director Paul Solet, at heart, is a Hitchcock wannabe of the Horror/Psychological Thriller genre. He has also been greatly influenced by classics like ROSEMARY'S BABY, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE and near-Cult Classics like IT'S ALIVE! His D. O. B. Doesn't appear anywhere I could find, but since he received B. A. degrees from Emerson college in 2002 in, get this now: FILM and PSYCHOLOGY, I doubt he's over 30! BTW, he also is credited for the screenplay on GRACE! We will be hearing a lot more about Paul Solet in the future! GRACE really gets in your brain, with that imminent sense that something dreadful and/or horrific is going to happen any second...but for the most part, it doesn't. I know there are a lot of you who flat out reject that in a movie. You'd probably be better off passing on GRACE in that case. 9*!!!

After looking into the director of "Grace" I found that this movie is obviously based on a short movie he did 3 years before. And that is more explanation than I needed because basically this movie has nothing but the premise you already get in the synopsis. Woman tries to get pregnant, then loses her child in a car-crash, still brings it to birth and miraculously the baby lives. Of course the baby was dead and so its now a kind of undead baby that needs blood instead of breast milk.

The whole movie is sloooow paced and tries to be edgy and have a kind of black humor (for example the woman is a vegan and pretty obsessed with healthy food etc.) but it leads nowhere. For a horror movie this is damn boring, for a psychological movie I miss any depth. It looks like the director just has the two odd ideas of the undead baby attracting a lot of flies and chewing on its mothers bloodied breasts. Apart from that I don't see much here. At first the strange calm atmosphere of the movie really captures you but about half through the movie you realize that "Grace" indeed is nothing but a short-story stretched to feature length. After all a real big disappointment.

A young woman aptly named Madeline Matheson (Jordan Ladd) gets pregnant, the child dies inside her, but she decides to deliver it anyway... and the child (Grace) is alive! But, that's the good news... the bad news is that she's a very "special" child and has special needs that will make her mother go to great lengths. How deep is a mother's love?

I think another reviewer summed this up perfectly: "sloooow paced", "damn boring", "nothing but a short-story stretched to feature length" and "a real big disappointment". I'd love to see quotes like these on the box cover. But, of course, that doesn't happen.

Sure, the concept is cool... zombie baby. Baby drinks blood. Nice. But yeah, the first twenty minutes are boring and each scene just drags. I haven't seen the short film version, but I have to assume it's better. The editor could have cut this down to an hour tops. That would have been appreciated.

Much is made of Madeline's vegan and bisexual lifestyle, if for no other reason than to contrast with the meat-loving child. This is overdone... the vegan talk is drilled home, again and again. I have been known to overlook minor plot points, especially when drinking, but this film won't let you risk that because you'll be reminded repeatedly.

Director Paul Solet, in an interview with HorrorHound's Aaron Crowell, says the film is "definitely a study of the idea of violating the will of the universe". With all due respect to Solet, that's giving the concept too much credit. I fail to see the "will of the universe" presented at all, and this is hardly a "study".

If credit has to be given to anyone for an outstanding job, it's "fly wrangler" Flo, who is not given any recognition in the film's credits. The use of flies was perhaps the best effect, so this omission is saddening.

I appreciate that Adam Green (director of "Hatchet") decided to produce this, as he's the perfect person to help new horror talent through the door to Anchor Bay. But I wish he had more hands-on involvement, because his style is clearly absent. Solet, a childhood friend of Eli Roth, needed more Ladd, Green and Roth inspiration... sometimes a short story is just a short story.

I would put this title firmly in the rental category. You do not need to own this, and it will not inspire you to take repeated viewings, unless you like devouring special features. And, in all fairness, they did plump this disc up with features. But a year from now, this will be a forgotten film.

Watching this one once is more than sufficient. That's not to say it's a bad movie, I thought it was quite well done and well acted, as well as an interesting concept, but it was just painful to watch.

Grace is most definitely a horror movie, however, it won't scare you, and it's not suspenseful, and there is no action at all. However, it will make you feel uncomfortable, and you will feel that way throughout the entire movie. The story is not complicated, if you read the IMDb description, then you know pretty much everything that will happen already. However, this is one movie that just can not be "spoiled", because knowing what is going to happen makes anticipating it even more uncomfortable.

If that is what you are looking for, then watch Grace. If you want something scary, don't watch Grace. If you want something ultra violent, don't watch Grace. The problem with Grace is that it technically fits perfectly in the horror movie genre, as it is horrible, it is a horror, however, the feeling it evokes and the motivation you should have for watching it are totally different from all other horror movies. I give it 5 stars because although I think it is a decent movie, I didn't actually enjoy it much, it just made me cringe. Also because I'm not going to sleep tonight, and I'm tired.....