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The Unborn | 2009 | PG-13 | - 4.8.5
A young woman (Odette Yusman) is possessed by the spirit of her dead twin, and she turns to her ailing grandmother (Jane Alexander), who reveals secrets about her haunted past, and to a rabbi (Gary Oldman), pleading with him to perform an exorcism. Also with Meagan Good, Cam Gigandet, Idris Elba and Carla Gugino. Directed by David S. Goyer. [1:28]
SEX/NUDITY 4 - A man and a woman lie in bed together: she has her head on his bare chest and they talk and kiss (she is mostly covered by a blanket).
► A woman is seen in a shower rubbing her neck and wet hair (we see her bare back, shoulders and arms). Women are seen wrapped in towels in a locker room scene (we see bare chests but no breasts, bare shoulders, backs, arms and legs). A woman is seen in low-cut tank tops throughout the film (some of the tops show cleavage). A young woman is shown in multiple scenes in her underwear (we see the backs of her legs and part of her buttocks are revealed). A woman is lying in bed in multiple scenes (in one scene we see her bare back, and in another we see her bare stomach).
► A young woman tells a man that her father won't be home until tomorrow morning (implying that they will be able to be alone together). A man tells a woman in a joking manner that she is giving him an erection (using a crude term). A woman talks to another woman about a man's "porn collection." A woman talks to another woman about a man masturbating (using a crude term). A woman jokes with another woman about her vagina being disease-infested. A woman calls another woman a derogatory term for a prostitute.
► A woman a holds a pregnancy test and it is positive. A woman has a sonogram (we see her bare stomach), we see the image of two fetuses on an imaging screen and we hear a loud heartbeat. A young woman walks with a man with their arms around each other.
VIOLENCE/GORE 8 - A woman wakes up on a ceiling and sees herself lying in bed: a pale, sickly-looking child lays next to her, puts his hand on her bare stomach, digs his hand into her stomach, and rips open a hole in her abdomen (her stomach is bloody).
► A woman opens her front door, a child stabs her in the abdomen (she bleeds through her shirt and screams), she struggles to get away from the child, the child's face changes into demonic-looking features, with a wide open mouth and pointed, sharp teeth, and snarls and goes after her; a man rushes the child and gets the knife away (he seems to want to hurt the child but does not).
► A woman lies on the floor after being stabbed, her eyes are open and her face is still, her head begins to jerk from side to side (it makes a cracking and breaking noise) and she makes strange moaning and growling noises; she then starts having what appears to be a seizure, her body shakes, her skin begins changing color and veins appear through it, she screams, her eyes change color also, her mouth opens exposing pointy-looking teeth, and she falls back to the floor and appears to be dead.
► A woman is chased by a man on all fours, he stops at the bottom of a staircase, his head turns completely around and upside down (we hear breaking and cracking noises as his head moves), his spine sticks out through his skin and his limbs are contorted and twisted, and he continues to chase the woman down a hallway. A man grabs a woman by the neck and begins to strangle her; he lifts her body off the ground by the neck, he opens his mouth and insects crawl out, and the woman screams and he has blood and bruises on his face.
► A woman participating in an exorcism turns into a "demon": she bends backward (her back makes a breaking noise, and as she screams she exposes pointy teeth and yellow eyes). A man transforms into a demon: his face changes, and he screams, he smashes his own head into a wall multiple times, and his face changes to demonic features and back again.
► A woman follows a dog into a wooded area and finds a white mask; she picks up the mask, the mask has strings that are buried in the soil, and when she clears away the soil she find a fetus in formaldehyde.
► A boy is shown shirtless and dead, lying on a table, and a man covers the child with a sheet. A man falls off a balcony (we see him fall and hit the ground), has blood on his ear, neck, cheek and chin and he dies. A man's body writhes and turns to dust.
► A man sees a dog with its head turned upside down on its body, it growls and snarls and shows its teeth, and the man yells at it. A young boy unexpectedly hits a woman in the face with a broken mirror shard (in the next scene, she has a small cut under her eye). A woman finds a young boy holding a sharp broken mirror shard over the crib of an infant while whispering.
► A woman approaches a house, sees police and ambulance workers, she asks another woman what happened, and the woman replies, "The baby wasn't breathing"; the woman runs after a stretcher and screaming, "She can't be dead!" as her dead infant child is taken away on a stretcher (she is restrained by men and we do not see the dead infant). A dead woman is seen lying on the floor (we see the lower part of her body but her face is obscured by a police officer leaning over the body).
► A young woman walks into a hospital room and sees the back of a woman hunched over in a chair and she is holding something while breathing strangely: the young woman slowly approaches, the woman in the chair looks up, and we see what appears to be a demon-like creature with large teeth and a blue body; it opens its mouth wide and screams and howls at the young woman, who screams out of fear, and the demon drops a large glass jar to the floor (the glass breaks, and liquid spills out on the floor along with a human fetus).
► A dead child, covered with a sheet, sits up (the sheet falls and we see his pale face, with eyes that are extremely blue, and makes hissing and growling sounds). A dead boy, who has come back to life, is seen standing and looking out of a window in a concentration camp, while other children watch him (he is pale and ghostly-looking). An apparition of a child opens its mouth in multiple scenes and a loud, startling noise is heard. A woman sees her dead mother emerge from a bathroom stall (she is pale and wearing a hospital gown) and she screams.
► A woman hits a boy on a tricycle with her car (the child strikes the windshield, but we do not see him hit the ground); the woman exits the car and finds the child standing behind the car, completely unharmed. A woman watches a film reel of an old abandoned building and she sees a dog and a ghostly-looking child (she is scared by the film). A woman is being chased and falls down a flight of stairs, an apparition of a child appears behind her, and both scream.
► A woman opens a medicine cabinet and the apparition of a boy's face appears, startling her. A woman is startled by a young boy standing behind her (he has pale white skin, broken capillaries in his face, blood-red lips, unnaturally blue eyes, and bloody cuts on his forehead). A dog wearing a white mask startles a woman. A woman is startled by a fetus opening its eyes.
► A man breaks through a wall and fights with another man, a woman tries to intervene and the man pushes her down; there is yelling and screaming, the woman jumps on the man's back, and he punches the other man and throws the woman off his back. A man hits another man over the head with a piece of metal, knocking him unconscious.
► A priest and a rabbi set up an exorcism for a young woman: the woman is strapped to a gurney, they place in her mouth a black plastic device that straps around her head (to keep her from biting her tongue), the rabbi blows into a large animal horn making a loud noise, reads Hebrew from a book, and the priest and other people form a circle and repeat the rabbi's words in English; the woman struggles and screams and her body writhes, rises and falls back down. During an exorcism a woman sees large insects, empty rooms, statues, a demon, a child and a fetus, and she screams, doors swing open and wind blows through the room, while an apparition of a small boy stands next to her. During an exorcism a priest becomes possessed (his eyes change color and he chases after people).
► A woman sweats, feels sick, goes into a bathroom stall and vomits in a toilet (we see the vomit emerge from her mouth, and then she spits). A woman looks through a hole in a bathroom stall and worms and cockroaches jump out and startle her; brown liquid, blood, insects and worms are seen and she witnesses the liquid streaming on the floor, the bugs crawling out of walls, and she screams and tries to leave, but the door won't open. A woman sees a large insect crawling on her hand and screams. A woman breaks open an egg in a frying pan and a large cockroach-like insect appears and crawls around in the pan (she screams).
► A woman goes for an eye exam; the doctor inserts a metal speculum into her eye in order to keep the eyelids open (we see her eye wide open, a large image of her eye on a screen, and multiple red capillaries on her eyeball). Two children are seen lying on medical tables, men are shown wrapping straps around the children's heads (they are performing experiments), one man is shown approaching the boy's eye with a large hypodermic needle intending to inject his eye but we do not see the needle go into the eyeball (we hear that the Nazis would inject children's eyes to experiment with iris pigmentation).
► A woman hears noises coming from the mirror in her bathroom on multiple occasions. A woman hears strange whispering coming from a baby monitor. A woman hears voices and becomes dizzy. A woman hears voices in multiple scenes. A woman's eyesight is blurry in a few scenes. A woman goes to a nightclub and the faces in the crowd appear blurry and distorted. A woman sees the apparition of a child standing in a crowd. An apparition of a child is seen in a photograph. An apparition of a boy is seen on a city street.
► In multiple scenes, the interior of a psychiatric hospital is shown. A child enters a room in a psychiatric hospital and we see the back of a woman's head with disheveled hair, sitting in a chair and wearing a green hospital gown. A child approaches a woman in a psychiatric hospital and we see the woman's face (she is very pale and stares ahead in a catatonic manner). A woman visits another woman in a home for senior citizens. Two women see an elderly man in a wheelchair and another woman explains that the man has had a stroke, and is paralyzed from the waist down.
► A woman talks about her mother hanging herself. A woman cries over her grandmother's death. A woman asks a man, "Is that why Mom killed herself?" A man talks about his wife being clinically depressed. A man talks about a fetus dying while in utero. A man talks about a fetus dying due to an umbilical cord "twisting around his throat." A woman talks about a "ghost or demon or something" trying to kill her and everyone around her. A child tells a woman that she is going to die. A woman yells at another woman to "get out!" A woman tells another woman that a senior citizens' home smells like diarrhea. A woman comments to another woman about a man "wearing a diaper." A woman calls Alzheimer's "old-timers" in a mocking manner. A woman talks about the Holocaust. A woman talks about being a twin in a concentration camp, and how Nazis wanted to do experiments on twins and on other children. A woman talks about the soul of a dead person. A woman talks about being possessed by an evil spirit or a "Dybukk." A woman talks about "The Book of Mirrors." A woman talks about exorcisms. A woman cries to a rabbi to help her and to perform an exorcism. A man talks about the Kabbalah and how its "Jewish mysticism." A woman tells another woman to break all the mirrors in her home and to burn the mirror fragments.
► A woman checks out a book from a library containing illustrations of evil spirits and ancient writing. Multiple children are shown in a concentration camp (Auschwitz). A woman gives another woman a pendant of "the hand of Miriam" for protection. A young woman breaks mirrors in her home with a crowbar. A woman burns pieces of mirrors in a fireplace.
► Two women cry and hug. A woman cries because she fears she's going crazy.
LANGUAGE 5 - 2 F-words, 7 sexual references, 4 scatological terms, 1 anatomical term, 3 mild obscenities, name-calling (retarded, crazy, freak, hag), 3 religious exclamations.
SUBSTANCE USE - College-aged people drink in a nightclub, a woman says she needs a drink, and a woman blames another woman's hallucinations on being drunk.
DISCUSSION TOPICS - Possession, exorcism, twins, death in utero, evil spirits, hallucinations, suicide, death of a child, the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, concentration camps, Kabbalah, Dybukk, mysticism, folklore, superstitions, death of a mother, pregnancy with twins, fear, haunting, religion, the afterlife, death of an infant, death.
MESSAGE - Evil can sense when you are weak. Only the strong survive fear.
CAVEATS
Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.
We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.
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Become a member of our premium site for just $2/month & access advance reviews, without any ads, not a single one, ever. And you will be helping support our website & our efforts.
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