DVD Review – The Unborn

I’m under your bed, licking your floor

I’ll be out of town until Monday afternoon, but next week will be packed with the last six reviews I need to complete my goal. Also, like I did last year, I’ll be posting a ghost story every day in the week leading up to Halloween!

The Unborn (Thailand, 2003)

I hope I never have to go to a hospital in Thailand. According to The Unborn, they are grimy, cramped, have iron bedsteads (no reclining beds?), have staff who apparently go home as soon as it gets dark, and are crawling with vengeful ghosts. Even the bathrooms in The Unborn look like they haven’t been cleaned in months, and every time the heroine needs help, the corridors are suddenly deserted. And the doctors and nurses are narrow-minded bullies to boot.

The main character in this one is a little edgier than usually Asian horror heroine: Por is a party girl bartender who makes extra cash by selling drugs for a brutal dealer. When she tries to cheat him, he drags her off to a swamp, beats the crap out of her, then tries to drown her. She’s rescued by an unspecified someone and taken to the aforementioned creepy hospital, where she’s shocked to discover she’s ten weeks pregnant.  A kindly doctor counsels her to get off the drugs and keep the baby; a nurse refuses to give Por the abortion she wants (!).

While she’s in the hospital, Por starts seeing the apparition of a long-haired, heavily pregnant woman. Is she a symptom of PTSD? Of course not.  She’s the ghost of a woman found drowned in the same swamp where Por nearly died, and she seems to want something from Por. She even follows Por home from the hospital. Por sets out to discover what the woman wants, and to give her some peace. The quest takes Por and her best friend and her anti-drug counselor into a nasty case of sorcery and superstition and plain old sordidness. And even after the resolution of the dead woman’s case, the movie keeps going, because there just has to be a twist.

The Unborn indulges in every cliché known to Asian horror: long-haired ghost lady, grimy bathrooms with exposed pipes (not only in the hospital, but in Por’s otherwise nice apartment too), the deserted hospital, the spectral quest for vengeance, the plot twist that’s pretty obvious. There are a couple stylish scenes, as when Por has a hallucination of drowning in the hospital bathroom. But in the horror category The Unborn is nothing we haven’t seen before. There’s not much in the way of gore or special effects, but also not many good old-fashioned scares.

At least it’s nice to see a main female character who’s not a boring good girl who starts seeing ghosts and ends up with the male side character who helps her out. Por is a tough kid, a drug addict with a hip haircut and slutty clothes. I suppose I should have been heart-warmed by her journey from bad girl to loving mommy, but I was actually just sort of disappointed in her. Intira Jaroenpura is very good as Por, but none of the other characters have enough depth to be interesting, not even the ghost, whose story is standard horror fare.

The movie is paced fairly quickly, but is too long and drawn-out; it might have worked as a short film but at nearly two hours, the viewer begins to get bored, especially since the plot is rather predictable. I actually groaned inwardly when the ‘end’ proved not to be the end, making way for the inevitable plot twist.  The music is quite well-done, but the creepy atmosphere it creates can’t hold up against the lackluster story and characters.

Recommend-o-meter: If you want a really unnerving Thai horror movie, try Shutter. The Unborn isn’t anything new or special.