A Jewish “Exorcist”? Long overdue. Meets “Schindler’s List”? Hold on a minute.
“The Unborn” is a baby-sitter horror flick (it’s for and about them) with classic creep-out elements that unite in a surprisingly engrossing story. There’s a missing mother, a Gothic mental hospital, bad dreams, a lurking child with glowing blue eyes, the possibility of an evil twin, and demonic possession.
The basis of it all, though, is the fear of getting pregnant. This movie knows its audience, and it’s set in Chicago because, if you’re a Cubs fan, it isn’t hard to believe that Satan is at work.
Casey (Odette Yustman, who is in the Jennifer Connelly family of blank lookers who should be in magazines, not movies) has bad dreams in which she’s pursued by a little boy and discovers a fetus in a shallow grave. Also, the toddler boy she baby-sits has been shining a mirror on his baby sister’s face while mumbling, “Jumby wants to be born.” These words are pretty disturbing the first time the little blighter utters them, and by the time they become the movie’s mantra they have a pronounced cooling effect on the blood.
When Gary Oldman, Jane Alexander and Carla Gugino bother to show up for a horror movie, it threatens to be above average. This one is, especially during the middle when Casey starts to piece together the details of her family’s hidden past.
This takes us back to . . . Nazi experiments? Tastewise, writer-director David S. Goyer is crawling out there on the end of the limb of a tree he has set on fire. Do we really want a fantasy film that builds on the real horrors experienced by people still living? How did Goyer feel about himself when writing the line, “It has fallen on you to finish what began at Auschwitz”?
Still, the people at whom the movie is aimed were born in the 1990s. For them, the Holocaust and the Middle Ages lie in approximately the same corner of the dusky past. They won’t be bothered.
Goyer is on firmer ground with the story of the Jewish demon – the dybbuk – a restless spirit of a dead person that can slip from one human body to the next at will. It particularly likes to use mirrors as portals between this world and the next. So there’s another quintessential teen moment in which the heroine smashes every looking glass she can find. Most of the teens in the audience have probably felt like doing the same.
I enjoyed the visual effects used to create some hellish creatures and the amusing nods to “The Exorcist” – cranial rotation, even a spooky staircase. But the movie slips in the last act. Oldman, as a rabbi who agrees to do an exorcism (instead of referring the girl to Father O’Leary down the street), doesn’t get any space to develop his character, so there aren’t really any stakes for him. Idris Elba is even sketchier as an Episcopalian priest who drops in for no particular reason.
As we rush through a climactic battle between good and evil, the ground rules about what the dybbuk wants and how to defeat it aren’t clearly established. So there’s this horrifying, deadly legend – and yet it comes in such small portions.
kyle.smith@nypost.com
THE UNBORN
Fetal attraction.
Running time: 88 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexual situations, profanity, disturbing images). At the E-Walk, the 84th Street, the Orpheum, others.