Slashing The Seats

The Unborn arrives still-born, confused, overwhelmed by its influences and riddled with incidental music that seems designed to inflict the viewer with its own brand of barbarous audio-vandalism.

Classic horror, this is not.

We’re plunged headlong into an ill-conceived dream sequence in which Odette Yusman finds herself jogging along an autumnal scene, only to be stopped in her tracks by a spooky child with bright blue eyes. The spooky child turns into a dog wearing a mask. The dog runs off and our heroine idiotically follows its path into a plot haunted by endless, unrelated and supposed scares that are less likely to make you touch cloth than a quarter-bag of imodium.

They don’t let up on the sub-Exorcist set-pieces and the choreographed shocks become so familar you can set your watch by them. One minute it’s insects climbing out of lavatories, the next the small boy is thrusting his hand into a stomach, then the dog reappears with its head on upside down (disproving Shaun of the Dead’s theorem that ‘dogs can’t look up). We get contorted old men, back-snaps and a bemused looking Idris Elba, fresh out of another career wrong-turn in Rocknrolla and, what’s more, we get Gary Oldman’s first memorable screen appearance in ages – and it’s memorable for all the wrong reasons.

In his role as an American rabbi he not only looks completely out of place, he appears to spend the rest of the movie trying to find the right place, before failing and giving up.

Things come to a head at the exorcism he was dead against, but then decided to perform after a rush of blood to the head. This final set piece is overblown, underwritten and mercifully brief – its happy brevity only soiled by the insipid promise of a sequel.

And what, exactly, have we done to deserve that?

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