LITERAL REMAINS

While babysitting the neighbor’s kids, Casey finds the young son holding a mirror to the infant’s face.  Casey tells the little boy to stop; he tells her “Jumby wants to be born now,” and then hits Casey with the mirror.  The next day, on her jog, Casey discovers an ambulance at the neighbor’s house.  The baby has died.  As Casey’s friend, Romy, informed her:  it’s bad luck for infants to see their reflections before turning a year old.

The hit the little boy gave Casey has injured her eye, discoloring it.  She is also having hallucinations.  She sees a doctor who informs her it is quite normal (the discoloration; she keeps the hallucinations quiet), it happens with twins, or the surviving twins.  It’s all news to her.  Casey learns from her father (her mother committed suicide in a hospital when Casey was a baby) that Casey had a twin brother who died in the womb.  It makes sense:  Casey has been seeing a little boy, and she believes it’s Jumby.

While searching through her mother’s things, Casey is lead to a woman named Sofi.  Turns out, Sofi, a Holocaust survivor, is actually Casey’s grandmother and the little boy haunting Casey is Sofi’s brother whom she killed in the concentration camp when they were children.  They were twins, and Nazis experimented on twins, which led to Sofi’s brother’s death.  But a dybbuk possessed her brother.  Sofi then proceeded to kill him.  A dybbuk, according to Jewish folklore, is an evil soul trying to enter into the living world, again, by any means necessary, mainly through possession of human vessels.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I waited so long about seeing this movie because I thought it would be a load of crap.  It’s not so bad.  It has an interesting story going on, and a strong visual sense, but little else.  The Unborn feels kind of thrown together and half planned; it kind of short changes you in the story development.  But it’s entertaining, if rushed to get to the jumps.

The shining star of this little vehicle, other than the dog with the upside-down head, is Gary Oldman as Rabbi Sendak.  Oldman is good in every scene (no matter how ridiculous the scene), as if he stopped by from a different, better, movie.

The Unborn is a mishmash of The Exorcist and just about every other possession movie out there, but the Jewish angle was nice touch.  It’s not the best movie, but it’s better than some of the other crap that crowds the shelves.

3 out of 5
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