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From the sinister grating of a shovel to a terrified scream, the Canadian thriller THE CHILD REMAINS is bizarre and complex, featuring so many ideas, elements, and longueurs that one can easily forget how one got from opening scratch to closing shriek. While it is possible to suggest that writer and director Michael Melski’s film is too much of a grab bag to stick the landing, for a good chunk of its runtime it’s an engaging enough gynecological haunted house mystery that just manages to scrape by due to the performances.
Suzanne Clément (best known for her collaborations with director Xavier Dolan) holds together THE CHILD REMAINS as she plays Rae, a former crime journalist suffering from PTSD due to the case that ended her career. On the verge of her mental breakdown, pregnant, and approaching the age of 42, Rae is reluctantly whisked away on a weekend holiday by her wannabe composer husband Liam (Allan Hawco) to a secluded inn that once was a home for unmarried mothers. The elderly woman, who appears to be the good-natured caretaker of the establishment (Shelley Thompson), makes everything a little odd, in addition, as Rae begins to have strange experiences, it becomes apparent that more lies beneath the surface of the decrepit old building.
Functioning much like films of this genre, THE CHILD REMAINS explores a couple’s crumbling marriage, framing the narrative around common horror set-ups. Alas, it’s only fair to suspect that this exploration does get some credence and dramatic weight from the PTSD angle, allowing Rae’s stronghold on sanity to be called into question. While I would usually scoff at “Think in a house in a light sense” Clément does manage to sell the limp analogy. Hawco, who had previously cartoonish energy and was trapped by the inn’s horrifying magic, is now everything except the gentle artist nature that he was. Melski seems to be showing to the audience, in a broader sense, a man’s weakness and frailty through this character, but all of that can only be guessed through Thompson who, sugarcoating everything turns hostile.
The three do solid enough work that once THE CHILD REMAINS goes off the rails, it’s still watchable if not exactly coherent. The film’s footing starts to slip on the back end without offering a resolution taking a hard left turn into sensationalism while Melski showered his magic pens on everything. Demonic Pregnancies, eugenics, religious hypocrisy, music‐playing ghosts, youth serums from hemoglobin, messages from postmortem, slasher-style extravagance, sauteed kids, monsters from basements, and families with hidden secrets come together in a state of nightmare that is full-blown mentally exhausting and chaotic. What could have easily been pegged as a Ti Westian slow-burn in the first half of the movie is instead a muddled mess of disharmonious themes. There is no doubt that both the director and the cast bring a sense of authority and devotion to such an unholy din, but in the end THE CHILD REMAINS is all sizzle, no steak, so to speak.
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