The Godsend

There's a surprising amount of children being killed off all at the hands of that bratty new child. She sure knows how to cause a scene! This is the second movie in a row for me where at the end a small person falls to their death from the upper story of a row house to the concrete bellow. This one's been sitting on my To-watch pile for a year or so, so I figured this was the perfect excuse to finally throw it in.

Enjoyable if unremarkable evil kid thriller. And it all ends on a wonderfully ambiguous and nasty note, so extra props for that. I'm one of those people who gets almost violently frustrated watching evil kid movies, because I am TOTALLY that dude who will haul them off to the nearest church and stab them with consecrated knives if I find a birthmark on their head. They're fucking EVIL and they needs to go!

Y'know how you make certain allowances when you watch old flicks, like "okay, they didn't have Furious 7 or p porn at their fingertips back then so I guess this was pretty thrilling stuff"? And then there are times when you watch old flicks and you think "there was no point in history when anyone could have found this entertaining"?

This is the latter x 10, A hardly passable knockoff of The Omen.

A strange pregnant woman shows up one day at the doorsteps of a young family of three kids, she gives birth and dissapears with the family caring for this baby. Over the years one by one the biological children end up dead by accident. We never get to see an actual death or gore only an after the facts scene.

While I love movies where the kids are the killers, see Bloody Birthday for the ultimate ride, The Godsend is a boring piece of tripe best to be forgotten it ever existed. There is no real sense of time as it jumps ahead years and some times days. The parents reactions to the death of their children is a bit 'ah well'. There is not one drop of blood to be seen in the whole movie or an on screen murder.

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth. Though I like the analogy of the cuckoo taking over a nest as reason enough. A nasty little film by director Gabrielle Beaumont. This is her only theatrically released feature film. She is better know for directing television series and tv movies like Death of a Centerfold: The film plays on the idea of a mother's love and how this can blind her own child's behavior.

As she gets left alone she walks about the room, taking it in, scrutinizing it. Pausing she pulls the phone cord from the wall and conceals it back behind the table before sitting down. Her fingers clench and unclench on a dirty white shawl that she carries and she resumes waiting. When it is time to give her a ride back to where she is supposedly staying, the strange woman immediately goes into labor. After the birth of her child, she simply vanishes.

Enter Bonnie, the blue-eyed offspring and adopted child of the Marlows. Certainly, this film does not create the sub-genre, but it was fairly fresh for the time and its evocative imagery is haunting and disturbing. The removal of such a keystone of storytelling could lead to a confusing mess, but here it instead gives the film a dream-like quality. A nightmare from which there is no escape, allowing the dread to continue to build upwards without giving the respite of the ordinary. As a storytelling tool it is quite effective. Each one is a seeming accident but we, the audience, know better.

We see the clues that the family overlooks and we can feel and empathize with the growing unease of the Marlow children as they begin to fear Bonnie of the bonnie blue eyes. It is we who see the clues, the fistful of hair torn from a young scalp, the shoving, the abusive behavior by innocent little Bonnie.

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The film delivers genuine content. Whispers are genuinely quiet, shadows are genuinely dark, and the fear and discomfort is palpable.

It is this realism that drives home the disquiet in the household as family tragedies unfold and tear the family apart. Meanwhile, like a cowbird such as the cuckoo, Bonnie continues to work to isolate Kate from the family, to have her all to herself and to prevent other children from being conceived and thus providing a threat to her desires.

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In an exceptionally chilling scene, Bonnie infects her sleeping father with the mumps which can cause sterility in adult men by gently kissing his lips and softly breathing into his mouth. This is, by far and away, one of the most disturbing sets of images from the movie and something that will stay with viewers long afterwards.

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Kate slowly sinks into depression and, arguably, madness as the tragedies stack one upon the other. When Alan finally confronts the truth the movie becomes even more grim and the psychology of a woman clinging to her remaining children biological and adopted works against him and he takes his daughter Lucy and flees.