Still/Born Review (2017) Worth Watching?

It’s about a young mom who loses one of her twins during childbirth and becomes convinced that a demon witch is after the other.

Still/Born was directed by Brandon Christensen and stars Christie Burke (from Crowsnest), Jesse Moss (from Wolfcop and Tucker & Dale vs Evil) and Rebecca Olson .

Fear the unborn.

Still/Born has been hanging around my Shudder queue for awhile now. I didn’t know anything about it other than it has a great poster and touches a disturbing concept which is a layup for a number of horror plots, everything from demon babies to postpartum depression would work well for a horror. Turns out, this movie combines the two into a surprisingly gripping story.

I'm normally not a fan of pregnancy/childbirth movies only because they tend to be steeped in cliche's. You know, there's the the usual happy couple followed by lots of screaming and yelling in childbirth followed by excessive crying and pleading for the safety of a baby and overall frailty.

Hell Baby was a nice digression from this and so was Still/Born.

The childbirth scene was quick and creative and immediately rolled into the couples life after settling in. You also get to see the grief that comes along with the loss of a child, but only enough to understand how it factors into the movie. Short 'n sweet. The vast majority of this movie put you into the mind of our young mother and the unrelenting terror she experiences. The suspense and dread in this one is real.

Overall, Still/Born reminded me a lot of Insidious, where a demon is trying to snatch a kid while a housewife runs around trying to figure out how to stop it. And that's fine, it's a great concept and there's room in horror for more movies like this. I actually really liked this take on the same concept, at least during the first half.

The second half of Still/Born really falls apart though, like really. All good decision-making goes out the window and the story gets super lazy. For example, in one important scene the mom is desperately trying to figure out what's going on. So she does a generic Google search and BOOM.. right there on the first page is a story about another woman who experienced the EXACT same thing... and she just so happens to live in the next town over. So she drives to this woman's house and within maybe 5 minutes has all the information she needs. That easy.

Then we get to the demon witch. There's definitely suspense surrounding the encounter, but the cheesy video tricks really took me out of the moment. I won't spoil anything, but the dated effects just didn't match the creativity of the first half of the movie at all. Still/Born has a great set up but then just gets lazy. Everything just kind fizzled out for me.