Directors: Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury
Writers: Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo
Stars: Alysson Paradis, Jean-Baptiste Tabourin, Claude Lulé
1 Hour, 22 Minutes
Synopsis
We start out looking at the baby inside the womb as his mother survives a car crash. Her husband isn’t so lucky. Credits roll.
Four months later, it’s Christmas Eve, and she’s planning to go to the hospital tomorrow morning to have labor induced. She meets up with her boss in the park; he’s a newspaper editor. He mentions that there’s something going on downtown, and there are riots and burning cars, but he doesn’t have anyone available to report on the incidents. He’ll be the one to drive Sarah to the hospital in the morning. She returns home to an empty house, waiting for morning to come.
She has a surprisingly graphic dream where she vomits up the baby, but wakes up when the doorbell rings. There’s a lady out there who wants to make a phone call for help. Sarah says no, and the woman calls her by name and says she knows her husband is dead. Sarah threatens to call the police, and the woman goes away.
No, she doesn’t. The power goes out and she threatens to break in the door. Sarah calls the police. Sarah grabs her camera and starts taking flash photos of the woman outside. The police arrive and search the area, but she’s gone. They promise to check in again later.
No, she’s not. In the next scene, we see that she’s inside the house. Sarah goes to sleep, and the woman come into the bedroom. The woman gathers supplies from the bathroom, and it looks like she’s planning to cut the baby out of Sarah’s belly. At the first cut, Sarah wakes up and they fight. Sarah locks herself in the bathroom, where she finds she has a big, messy cut on her face… and her water has just broken.
Sarah’s boss arrives to drive Sarah to the hospital, and he has a key. He runs into the crazy lady and introduces himself. He assumes the woman is Sarah’s mother. Sarah’s real mother shows up.
The real mother storms upstairs to the bathroom, and Sarah stabs her in the neck, killing her. The crazy lady then stabs the boss, and it’s back to just the two of them. It’s… very messy. There’s more screaming and stabbing through the almost-closed bathroom door.
The police return for the mid-night check-in. She answers the door and pretends to be Sarah. They almost fall for it, but then they notice she’s not pregnant. Crazy lady stabs the cop who was arresting her, and then goes after the other one with the police man’s gun. The third cop comes in with an already-apprehended criminal in tow.
The power goes out again, and the cop/criminal duo go to look for the breaker box. She kills them both with a pair of scissors in the dark. Sarah bites the woman in the face and makes her way downstairs. The woman hits Sarah in the head with a toaster, nearly knocking her out, but Sarah turns the tables with flaming can of cooking spray.
Sarah then gives herself a tracheotomy with a knitting needle and then duct tapes it to stop the bleeding when she’s done. I’m pretty sure that’s not how that procedure is supposed to work, and it’s unclear why it was necessary in the first place.
Finally, they confront each other, and the woman explains that she was the driver of the other car in the beginning, and she lost her baby then. One of the injured cops turns the power back on. The cop then goes berserk and beats Sarah severely in the stomach with a baseball bat.
The woman then helps Sarah deliver the baby… with scissors. The stairs literally run red with blood. Sarah dies, and the crazy woman sits in the rocker and rocks the baby.
Commentary
This is really gory and tense, with some awesome special effects. Various scenes of carnage are interspersed with a point of view from the in-utero baby, and it looks really uncomfortable to be inside Sarah. I’m not quite clear on why the cop (or maybe it was the criminal) attacked Sarah. For a moment, I thought he was a zombie, which would have been a neat twist, considering all the talk of riots downtown.