Christie Burke plays Mary, who settles into her life of young motherhood with her husband Jack (Jesse Moss) and their surviving twin baby, Adam. “Still/Born” is a slow descent for her, in which she goes from plainly sad to sleepless and eventually a slave to hallucinations, especially when she sees through the baby monitor something lurking over Adam’s crib at night. All the same, Jack becomes less and less helpful, leaving her to take care of the baby and become even more isolated in her fading sense of what is real. It doesn’t help her, or the script’s integrity for that matter, that he’s the type of bozo to quietly appear behind his panicked wife (twice), or that he lacks sensitivity to his wife’s conditions, making him a type of passive villain.
As it builds on a very real medical condition but talks about it often through jump-scare horror, "Still/Born" clumsily tiptoes the line between being disturbing and exploitative. Halfway through the movie, Mary finds some counsel in a mother who also had a demonic postpartum experience, which here becomes just another genre cliché (in this case, mythology about demonic episodes of past). At the very least, "Still/Born" makes no bones about its metaphor, with Michael Ironside appearing in two scenes as a therapist to diagnose Mary's conditions originally as postpartum depression and later as postpartum psychosis.
What proves essential to “Still/Born” is the noteworthy and grounded work by Burke. She painfully articulates the ways we can’t step back from a trauma that consumes us, while showing the definitive levels of irrationality a terrified person may experience. When no one believes her as things start to get spooky Mary is vulnerable, tragic; when she realizes that she might be able to sacrifice her neighbor’s baby to save her own, she’s desperate, terrifying. Burke is an always-reliable presence, even when Christensen is merely setting her up for something to jump out at her.
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