Grace (2009)

Review by Jim Hemphill

"Subtlety" and "nuance" are not words that immediately come to mind while viewing most contemporary horror movies, but Paul Solet's debut feature Grace is as far from an ordinary horror film as you can get. An eerie meditation on childbirth and matriarchy, it's a movie that's as intelligent as it is scary, and its hypnotic blend of surrealistic imagery and universal fears (most of them having to do with the anxieties of parenthood and love, romantic and otherwise) really gets under your skin in a way that even the best slasher flicks can't touch.

Like Kubrick's The Shining or Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, it's a movie that relies less on shocks and gimmicks than on a steadily increasing sense of unease-and yet, when the tensions that have been building throughout the film are released in the bloody final act, Grace takes the audience in the palm of its hand and squeezes as hard as any Eli Roth or Rob Zombie opus. If you're one of the many horror fans who has spent the last several years lamenting the abundance of remakes and the dearth of genuinely original ideas, this is the movie for you.

The film begins with the conception of the title character, a baby born to vegan mom Madeline and her more carnivorous husband Michael. It's an inauspicious beginning for the tyke, given that Grace has perhaps the least erotic opening sex scene since Judith Myers's boyfriend took his girlfriend upstairs, came in her, then left the house in the space of about thirty seconds at the start of Halloween. The fact that Madeline's husband is a bad lay is the least of her problems: she also has a midwife with an intense lesbian crush on her, a domineering mother-in-law, and she ends up in a car crash that leaves her with a dead baby in her womb-or so everyone thinks. Madeline decides to carry the baby to term, and when it's born she seemingly wills it back to life. Everything's great-until Madeline realizes that her vampiric baby likes to feed on something a little stronger than formula and decides that she'll do whatever it takes to protect her "special" child.

To reveal more about the plot would be to rob you of one of Grace's pleasures, which is its utter, relentless originality. Writer-director Solet takes what could have been a standard riff on Larry Cohen's It's Alive or other evil kid movies and layers one interesting idea on top of another: the myriad subplots, supporting characters, and visual motifs (including Madeline's very strange habit of watching documentaries about animal cruelty to relax) play off of each other in enigmatic and unpredictable ways. Ultimately what links the various strands is a focus on obsessive love, whether it's a mother's love for its child or a rejected lover's inability to let go; Grace isn't the only character in this movie who needs to literally or metaphorically feed on other humans in order to survive. Solet's screenplay is a model of concision and complexity, in which a wide range of themes are perfectly integrated into a deceptively simple package-the straightforward genre framework is used as a foundation for a multitude of provocative ideas.

Which isn't to say that Grace is merely an intellectual exercise. To the contrary, it's a potent, disturbing horror film that more than delivers the goods in terms of gore and visceral terror (during an infamous Sundance screening, two men fainted while watching the film). Like the best films of Wes Craven or George Romero, Grace fulfills its genre's baser requirements but avoids sensationalism; its horror grows out of character and theme rather than an externally imposed desire to shock. It helps that Solet has a fearless lead performer in the form of Jordan Ladd, who gives one of the least affected performances I've ever seen in a horror film; she's understated and ambiguous, and her low-key approach is quite risky given that she's responsible for carrying most of the film. Ladd's gamble pays off, though-her refusal to provide the audience with obvious indications of her inner psychology adds to the film's provocative nature. This is a movie populated by very strong women, from Madeline to her mother-in-law to the midwife (the men are uniformly weak dopes who are easily manipulated by their wives and moms), but Solet and the actresses leave the audience feeling ambivalent about this strength-it alternates between being empowering or appalling depending on which character's point of view is being favored in any given scene, and the sophisticated view of gender politics is sure to leave viewers with plenty to argue about after the film is over.

Ladd's restraint is echoed in nearly every aspect of the production, from Austin Wintory's unusually stripped-down musical score to cinematographer Zoran Popovic's use of negative space in his compositions. This is not a horror film that forces its effects, which of course only makes it all the more powerful when it goes for the throat. Solet's emphasis on body horror and his formalist aesthetic provoke obvious comparisons with early David Cronenberg, particularly Rabid and The Brood, and there are echoes of Polanski films like Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby as well. Yet there isn't much film-geeky self-consciousness in the movie; Solet is clearly well schooled in the canon of horror classics, but he doesn't litter Grace with the kinds of references and in-jokes that have become commonplace in the post-Scream era (the name of Madeline's cat is one of the few exceptions). He assimilates his influences instead of simply regurgitating them, absorbing Cronenberg and Polanski's strengths into his own cinematic DNA. Just about every young horror director that comes along aims to emulate legends of the genre like Cronenberg, Polanski, and Romero, but Paul Solet is one of the first to not only invite but earn the comparison.