Sarah Dekker is dealing with the trauma of an abortion. Shunned by her mother and dumped by her boyfriend, she recovers at an old parochial house. Unbeknownst to her, the house is the site of a mass baby grave – they need a mother.
At first glance, there’s a lot of elements in this movie’s marketing that arouse curiosity. First, there’s the simple plot: a young woman recovers from her abortion procedure in a country home haunted by the ghosts of a mass grave of babies. Then there’s the trailer: a highlight reel of a shocking monster, some moody portrayals of an idyllic country home, and a few bits of dialogue that sell a whole more than this thing gives. What I found, instead, was a laughably reductive version of all the elements I just described. “The Perished” fails to serve up meaningful plot or characters, tense frights, useful effects, or really any impactful perspective on its subject: post-abortion trauma.
The film tells the story of Sarah Dekker (Courtney McKeon) from a wild night out to pregnant to abortion and, most importantly, to recovery. Look, I want to say I understood the plot or that a lot of it was contrived. The truth is the audio on this damn thing was so overprocessed that almost every major dialogue scene sounded like it was underwater and once you eliminate audio from a movie like this… well… it’s boring. I simply can’t bring myself to say I watched the entire thing. Who would if you couldn’t hear a word of it?
Despite that major grievance, I admit this film plays like a bingo card of cheaply made movies, and not in a fun way. The characters sputter their way through expository dialogue, acting to the utmost limits of this very constraining script. Camera angles feel hazily contrived to barely fit a scene. Often the edit cuts back and forth from a basic coverage perspective that repeats itself so much ad nausea. The location, while nice, fails to add anything more than just several rooms to shoot a movie in. The action, second place to so many terrible dialogue scenes, that does finally comes our way serves no emotional response. The finale feels forced and completely haphazard introducing a motivation for a villain and delivering on a villain in the same moment.
Even as a horror film it fails to shock. There exists a bloody man-suit character that haunts the dreams of our protagonist. Its sound effects are visceral and its costuming feels gross enough to elicit surprise – at first. The gag wears itself thin with each encounter to the point where its potency in the finale feels wasted and we no longer fear it nor anything going on at that point. There’s a buildup to this with “alarming” gags that really turn out to be the same couple of things over and over again: dead birds, bloody mouths, the sound of babies crying, and the protagonist’s crotch bleeding profusely. It’s done with either too much fanfare (in the case of the birds) or too much repetition (as in the crotch bleeding.)
This movie, while incompetent to its own detriment, fails to produce any real-life emotions. Even the main character Sarah – who’s given a little to work with – falls flat. For most of her persecution and tribulations, she pontificates and panics, nothing else. More importantly, this film reduces the politics of abortion. Portraying unwanted pregnancies as the byproduct of a raucous night out and a woman who tried and failed to prevent her pregnancy. Even the abortion-monster who haunts her performs some kind of role as a guilt complex shaming women who wanted a choice over their body. Then, when being haunted by some abortion-monster isn’t enough, her body punishes her for undergoing the procedure by losing her teeth and bleeding (significantly) out of her vagina. That entire process feels like it was written by a man who looked up abortion on Wikipedia and got excited. Just when it couldn’t get any worse her boyfriend (who bails on her early in the film and for some reason I couldn’t hear/understand comes back to her), berates her for not letting him have any choice in the matter. His sister grows jealous of her for even being fertile in the first place. The finale resolves itself when Sarah chooses to be the mother of this abortion-monster. It’s not very nuanced.
There’s little to no substance to this movie. It reads like a Wikipedia article about unplanned pregnancies and abortions. It lacks any depth or emotion. Its effects feel repetitive and banal after long enough. You can’t hear a damn thing. I watched this in the privacy of my own home so none of you would have to. Save yourselves the agony and find something else to watch.
Available on VOD April 7th
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I hate to say it, but doing what was just done triggers the oh yeah mechanism in the brain. What happens in this circumstance is that curiousity takes over. Like telling your kids something not to do, and they just have to try it.
We’ve created a monster!!!