 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Still/Born • Year: 2017 • Country: Canada • Director: Brandon Christensen • Main cast: Christie Burke, Jesse Moss, Rebecca Olson • Runtime: 87 minutes • Production company: Digital Interference Productions, Hadron Films • TRAILER |
We are at the equator of this year’s Sitges Film Festival, and I think I can beforehand state that I have seen the worst movie to be screened this current edition. The trailer of the movie already looked forced and unoriginal, but I couldn’t expect to witness this hour and half of nonsense.
Starting with the plot, one could already assume this was not going to be the most original movie of the season. The newby mom Mary is giving birth to twins, but one of them is born dead. She and her husband just moved to a big house, to start a new life as a family, but lots of strange hallucinations chase Mary. Something is after her child. And, of course, no one believes her. The psychiatrist played by Michael Ironside, in an appearance closer to a cameo than a supporting role, diagnoses her with postpartum psychosis. But, of course, the fact is different and some kind of supernatural entity, looking like an old homeless woman, wants to still and eat her baby.
If the story is not very creative, the direction is defective big time. The perpetrator of this load of piffle is debutant Brandon Christensen. He also wrote the script together with Colin Minihan, the creator of movies like Grave Encounters (2011) or Extraterrestrial (2014). And what we get in Still/Born is a continuous set of hollow conversations, stupid action, lame cinematography and soundtrack, and more forced foreseeable frights than an adult can stand. The two main stars of the movie, Christie Burke and Jesse Moss, having almost all the screen time, can’t do anything to salvage this sinking production. So instead they join forces to the global chaos to deliver a performance that at some points can’t be described as anything but stupid. As plain and simple like this.
Today the theatre was almost full despite being a morning screening. And hearing the comments from the rest of the audience, I think nobody was expecting much from this movie. Still, we came to this festival to have fun and watch as many movies as possible, so we sat on our chairs with the best of the expectations. “It can’t be that bad”, was the global thought. Well, we were wrong. It IS that bad. The crowd was laughing out loud at the tense or emotive moments of the film for the bad they were. And no, it wasn’t made on purpose, it is only an awful movie. At the end of the projection, I heard some people saying “this movie is so bad that it’s fun”. Well, I can’t share that opinion. It is true that I chuckled a couple of times feeling nothing but embarrassment, but at no point I can categorize this movie as “too bad that it’s fun”. It wasn’t fun, it was an absolute waste of time.
RATE: 1/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6087426
