The Unborn (2009)

The Unborn arrives from 2009, which is to say from the last quiet moments before the culture decided that every genre picture owed its audience a thesis. David S. Goyer writes and directs a straightforward possession narrative: a young woman named Casey is stalked by a dybbuk, a spirit trapped between worlds, which wants to use her body as a door. There are mirrors that must be broken, a hamsa amulet, a rabbi, a priest, and a great deal of running through corridors. The film is interested in scares. It is not interested in anything else.

Idris Elba appears as an Episcopal priest and Meagan Good as the loyal best friend, and neither performance arrives freighted with commentary. They are simply people in a horror movie, which in 2009 was unremarkable and now reads as almost quaint. The screenplay reaches for Auschwitz and Josef Mengele's experiments on twins, but it does so as a plot mechanism, a way to give the dybbuk a backstory with some weight. History here is set dressing, not a sermon. The same holds for the film's treatment of mental illness: Casey's mother is described as clinically depressed and suicidal, and the film frames this as the spirit's collateral damage, not as a subject requiring advocacy.

The result is a horror film that asks nothing of its audience beyond a willingness to be startled, and it does not always succeed even at that. Critics were unkind. Audiences turned up anyway, and the picture turned a healthy profit, which suggests the appetite for unadorned supernatural menace had not yet vanished. We are left with a tidy specimen: a film with no agenda, no messaging, and no interest in the conversation. For the purposes of this classification, that is a clean sheet.