Okay, let's back up. As I've noted waaaaaay before, I have a love for movies about the evil children, so I've been looking forward to Grace for some time. The trailer was creepy as shit, there was tons of buzz at the festivals, and look at that fucking poster! I had waited to watch this movie with my mom, as she's a OB/RN and breastfeeding consultant, so I also got the inside scoop on what this movie got right. (fun fact: despite what is said near the end of the film, olden time breastpumps made out of brass and glass do not work as well as a modern Medela electric!)
(minor spoilers ahead in this paragraph) Grace involves a pregnant, vegan lady who decides to get a delivery via weird New Age midwife (who is, unusually, also a doctor from Columbia). Unfortunately, things rapidly go wrong, as she and her husband are in an accident that kills the latter. It seems clear that the baby is also dead, but the wife decides to continue waiting a few weeks for a delivery to occur, and glory be, the babby is alive. Except not really. Oh yeah, and it also doesn't really like milk. Can you, intelligent reader, determine what is going to happen? Hint: there's also a subplot about the dead husband's mother and her doctor meddling around.
There's alot that works really well. Jordan Ladd nails the weird mix of grief, postpartum depression, and blinding exhilaration over the miracle birth. Most of the artsy shots aren't too awful, especially the gradual degeneration of the marital home and flypaper surrounding the crib, though by the third shot of the mother doing something while the television played some slaughterhouse documentary, I felt a little ridiculous. Up until the final sequence of events, the movie manages to juggle the various subplots, all basically dealing with how crazy bitches are, fairly well. I was also pleased that (minor spoilers I guess) the aforementioned "Grace" isn't some evil demon baby, but instead the movie draws its horror from the extremes of the parent/child relationship.
And there's the effects. One gets the impression that the director saw Dead Ringers about a gazillion times, as while the gore is gross, it's gross neither in the lurid cartoony 80's slasher way nor the emotionally manipulative torture horror way, but in the "oh god this is boring right into the lizard center of my brain" way. All is very unsettling and uncanny as the best domestic horror pictures seem to do, and right to the end I was pretty much pumping my fist at the movie as it slowly rounded the track, never letting up until holy shit what the fuck happened.
Grace was originally a short film, and it really explains the utter abortion (hurr) of the ending. Everything about the movie, in retrospect, shows a great idea that could only be sustained until it came time to close the whole thing up. Then, the movie suddenly warps from a creepy study of motherly instincts to a tone of wackiness more at home in a classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel. I get the unfortunate feeling that the filmmaker recognized the dissonance of tone, and inserted in there as some easy attempt to broadcast a message about something, but FUCK THAT.
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