- Directed by Andrew Semans
- Written by Andrew Semans
- Stars Rebecca Hall, Tim Roth, Grace Kaufman
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 43 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6uIvEpxQ9o
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
After some consideration, we think it might be best to think of this as a twisted modern fairy tale. It’s well made with great performances, and the dialogue is excellent. How much is real and how much is not? We really don’t know. It’s good to go into this one blind. And prepare to be puzzled and pondering when you’re done.
Synopsis
Margaret listens to a younger woman complain about her abusive boyfriend. Then she walks back to her office as credits roll. She goes home and has sex with her boyfriend Peter; she asks him how his wife is doing. She then goes in to wake up her daughter, Abbie.
At work, she gives a presentation; she has a high level corporate job in the medical field, and she seems very intelligent and capable. At home, Abbie says she found a tooth in her wallet, but it’s not hers. We see that Margaret runs a lot. That night, she gets a call from Abbie, who is in the hospital, injured after drunkenly falling off a bicycle. Abbie complains that her mother is always overprotective.
She talks to the abused woman at work again, and once again promises to keep it all confidential. At a conference later, she sees someone in the audience and she gets really upset— she has to get up and leave. She runs all the way home to check on Abbie. Then she goes into the bathroom and cries. She then starts Googling “David Moore, Biologist” and tells Abbie that she’s staying home tonight. She nods off and dreams of cooking a baby in the oven.
The next day, she calls Peter to have sex in the bathroom at work, but he’s not really into it. She goes home and gets drunk with almost-eighteen years old Abbie. The next day, she sees that man again in the store and follows him. She drags Abbie out into the parking lot but refuses to explain anything. Margaret swears she’s just upset because Abbie will be going away to school soon.
Margaret starts slacking at work; she’s very distracted and blows a presentation. She sits in the park and spots the man reading a newspaper across the way. She tells him to go away, but he claims at first to have no idea who she is. He then says Ben is there with him and rubs his belly. He says she told him about Abbie and her own name, even though she didn’t. It seems like he’s gaslighting her.
Margaret goes to the police and tells them about David. They split up 22 years ago. The officer is very supportive but says there’s nothing he can do until David actually does something. He hasn’t actually approached or threatened her in any tangible way.
Margaret asks Gwyn, the girl from work, if she could kill someone, and Gwyn says probably not. Margaret confesses that she did something bad when she was young; something unforgivable. It’s a long and chilling monologue. She tells how she fell for David back when she was eighteen, who soon started being super controlling, subjecting her to increasingly worse tasks and abuse. She got pregnant but wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. She named the baby Benjamin, but David got jealous and sent Margaret out for groceries. When she came home, David simply said he’d eaten Ben. “He’s in my belly” and that he could still feel him moving around down there. Gwyn gets upset and goes home.
The next day, Margaret starts stalking David. She knows where he lives and follows him. She meets him at a diner. He says that Ben is still inside him, suffering. “At any moment, I could purge the boy; put him out of his misery.” He demands that Margaret start walking to work barefoot instead of driving. Again, she threatens him, but he doesn’t seem to mind. “You kill me, you kill him.” He also hints that he may have been the one who hit Abbie’s bicycle.
The next morning, Margaret walks to work, barefoot. Later, Abbie says that Margaret needs to go see someone, as she’s “having an episode.” Margaret lies and says that someone from work is behaving erratically and that Abbie should avoid him. Abbie realizes that it’s only halfway true, but she agrees to watch out.
She goes to David’s hotel, and the clerk says he isn’t staying there. She goes upstairs into his apartment and finds almost nothing there except an old photo of her and an old baby blanket. The landlady comes in and throws her out.
Margaret buys a gun and starts following David around. Abbie calls Peter to come and help; she’s worried about her mother. He gives her the number for a psychiatrist. Margaret might be a little irrational. Abbie thinks Margaret is making all this up to control her and keep her from going away to school.
She follows David out to a dark place and points a gun at his head as he sleeps on a bench. “You kill me, you kill him,” David warns. He grabs the gun out of her hand. He makes more demands and threatens Abbie’s life and then walks away with the gun.
The next morning, Abbie packs her stuff and leaves. Then Margaret beats up Peter for trying to help her. She threatens,“try to impede my mission one more time and I’ll beat you until you’re dead!”
David comes to see her at work. “I’m the only one here who can see you,” he taunts her. He tells her to meet him at a place at ten o’clock. She writes a letter and leaves a video for Abbie in case tonight goes badly.
She goes to the new hotel and finds David there. He has an old drawing that she once made. He talks, and she rubs his belly. Did she just feel his baby kick in there? He says that he and Ben forgive her, and she cries. She believes that her son is alive inside David. “He needs to be fed; he needs to be held,” she insists. “I have him now, and he has me, and I think that we don’t need you any more.”
She pulls out a knife and cuts him, but he gets the knife away. Then she pulls out another knife and stabs him again; he stabs her as well. She pulls him down onto the floor and ties him up. He goes on and on about her killing their son and that he’s a better mother than she is. She cuts his belly open and saws the hole bigger and bigger. She reaches inside and digs for Ben.
Finally, she finds baby Ben inside, intact, alive, and perfectly healthy. She pulls him out. “I saved you,” she whispers.
We see Abbie in her room, Perfectly fine. She comes in to see Margaret and the baby. She’s really leaving for school this time, and everything is fine now.
Commentary
For a long while, we were wondering if David was even real or a figment of Margaret’s imagination. At no point do we ever see David interact with anyone other than Margaret. It’s clear that Margaret is losing touch with her sanity, but is she simply becoming disconnected from reality? And if he is real, is she the dangerous one?
Either way, the suspense ramps up, albeit a little too slowly for our tastes. There was about a half-hour too much angst in the middle of the film. The whole thing is more of a psychological thriller than horror, at least up until the last few minutes.
I don’t think I understand the final scene. Was she fantasizing everything? Were all three of them in some kind of afterlife? Was any of it real? Was all of it real? I do not know.
What I am sure of is that this was a lot of tension buildup with an inconclusive ending that felt weak. And the ending is the horror element. I’ll give this one a pretty low grade because of that.