Review of The Unborn (2009) by Chads — 10 Jan 2009

The title is misleading. "The Unborn" plays like a Mel Brooks parody of William Friedkin's "The Exorcist". It's not some revenge film about a fetus with an axe to grind as the title suggests.

So be prepared. Akin to Bryan Singer's "The X-Men", the filmmaker uses Auschwitz as the setting for an inappropriate, and downright bizarre foray into science fiction. So be prepared for the portrayal of Josef Mengele's experiments on children, while a concentration camp survivor tells the origin story of Casey's demon.

Talk about your dialectical quagmires, in the same film where the heroine is haunted, but finds the time to look hot in her underwear while being haunted, there are dead Jewish children on slabs in the morgue.

A Dybbuk reanimates the holocaust survivor's twin brother, as if this gathering of twins slated for death didn't already have enough on their plates: dye in the eyes, vivisection, castration, and now, a murderous Hebrew spirit named Jambi.

"The Unborn" is offensive in this respect: for Casey's grandmother Sofi(Jane Alexander), the surviving twin, her testimony about the war discloses an entity native to her heritage as haunting her more than the Germans.

The Auschwitz experience becomes somewhat trivialized, made idiosyncratic by this alternate history. Juxtaposed against the paranormal, Mengele, and the Nazis, are almost beside the point. Casey(Odette Yustman), by all appearances, is a gentile at the outset of "The Unborn", but during the course of the film, she gets in touch with her past, while the past literally touches her.

She's touched by a dybbuk.