About.com Rating

To date, David S. Goyer has been known more as a screenwriter than a director, having found success penning the three Blade movies, the two latest Batman movies and the cult favorite Dark City. His attempts at directing, however, have been far less acclaimed: the third Blade film paled in comparison to the first two, and The Invisible came off as shallow, dreary melodrama. The Unborn is Goyer's third crack at directing horror, and while it might not be the proverbial "charm," it's at least his best genre directorial effort yet.

The Plot

College student Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman) is having nightmares. Not your typical "realize you're walking around in your underwear" nightmares -- she does plenty of that in real life -- but rather nightmares of a creepy little boy with one glove (Michael Jackson fan? Underachieving kleptomaniac?) who seems to have bad intentions.

Her waking hours are no less odd, as one of her eyes begins to discolor and a child she's babysitting suddenly goes loopy, warning her that "Jumby wants to be born" before whacking her in the face with a mirror. Fearing that she might be losing her mind like her late mother, Casey goes to see a doctor, who suggests that her eye color might be the result of her being a twin -- a fact that comes as a surprise to her.

As the nightmares grow stronger and more real, Casey delves deeper into her background to discover that she not only had a twin brother -- nicknamed Jumby -- who died in utero, but that her grandmother also had a twin who died. Grandma breaks down the complex truth, which involves Nazi experiments, undead children, twins, mirrors and Jewish folklore.

Basically, there's a dybbuk -- an evil spirit in Kabbalah lore -- that tried to possess Grandma's brother back in World War II but was thwarted and has sought a way back into the living realm ever since.

Twins, for some reason, are particularly susceptible to possession -- which would explain the Olsens -- so Casey is the dybbuk's prime ticket for entry into our world. Its goal is to break her down mentally and physically so that she'll have little energy to fight its hostile takeover. But with the help of her friends and an unusually open-minded rabbi (Gary Oldman), she hopes to exorcise the spirit before it can complete its heinous task.

The End Product

Saying that The Unborn is David S. Goyer's best directorial effort is a bit like saying that the GVX was the best model of Yugo. It's pretty enough on the outside, but the substance just isn't there. It trots out all the elements that are supposed to be in a scary movie -- ghostly kids, surreal dreams, bumps in the night, convoluted rules of mysticism explained by old people who should be dead by now and nary a parent in sight -- with increasing predictability and decreasing sense.

That said, Goyer's lover of the genre is apparent in the film's outlandish effects and set pieces. He finds ample space for the sort of slime, goo, bugs, grisly contortions, ancient incantations and jump scares that he no doubt grew up on. The visuals are the biggest selling point, sandwiching warped images of twisted bodies, upside-down heads and distorted mouths into a grotesque gallery as striking as any horror movie in the past few years.

Unfortunately, the content can't live up to the visuals. The hollow sheen that many viewers have come to expect from mainstream blockbusters is evident in The Unborn's silly, needlessly complicated plot, which throws in too many extraneous mystical elements regarding twins and mirrors and Nazis that add little to the meat of the film, while taking too many shortcuts in moments that matter. The storytelling is surprisingly lazy and predictable, considering that's Goyer's forte.

It's hard to say whether the shallowness of the film is merely an ode to the often-silly horror the '80s or whether it's just sketchy filmmaking, but I'd wager it's a combination of the two. Still, it doesn't take much depth to generate "boo" scares, and The Unborn does just that. There is a sense of fun within the dumbness, and those looking for a few screams on a dark and stormy night could find worse places than this quick-paced Exorcist on steroids.