BIRTHRITE
Director Ross Partridge brings a dark and nuanced story to Popcorn Frights 2024 audiences. When a pregnant woman inherits a country home, she and her girlfriend move in with happy expectations. But something from the town’s past looms over everyone.
Medical gaslighting, similar to Kindred, details authentic feelings of pregnant individuals, loss or not. But, BIRTHRITE‘s sinister underpinnings weave small-town history and their occult connections. The script from Patch Darragh and Erin Gann is seriously twisted. Reveal after reveal keeps you in a constant state of confusion and intrigue.
The cast is spectacular. Michael Chernus (Werewolves Within) and Owen Campbell (My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To)provide outstanding performances. Jennifer Lafleur gives Rosalie this eerie balance of loving care and dark self-interest. She steals every scene.
Juani Feliz plays Maya with a grounded love for Alice. She 100% holds her own in the everchanging emotional atmosphere. Alice Kremelberg gives Wren desperation and fear only a mother knows. It is an intense turn brimming with surprise after surprise.
Fall On Your Sword delivers a classic haunted house of dread style score. It reminded me of the opening theme song for the Nickelodeon show Are You Afraid of the Dark? BIRTHRITE mixes the chaos of pregnancy and delves into witchcraft with such complexity it makes your head spin. The film is so layered you cannot help but be captivated. This one will stick with you long after the screen goes black.
YEAR: 2024
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 100 min
DIRECTOR: Ross Partridge
WRITER: Patch Darragh, Erin Gann
STARRING: Alice Kremelberg, Juani Feliz, Michael Chernus, Jennifer Lafleur
Isolation, survival, depression, organized chaos. These are heavy-hitting words to describe a film with a blunt force trauma of an opening. My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To is a film that’s been on everyone’s lips for a year now. It’s been killing it on the festival circuit, and rightly so. This slow-burn horror puts three siblings at odds due to one’s unique affliction. Jesse has become the taskmaster Mamabird, driving the survival of her family. Dwight is stuck between resentment and loyalty as his patience is running out. Youngest brother Thomas just wants to break free of his physical and emotional prison. Stunted in every way possible, what would life look like without his elder siblings? Is blood thicker than water? My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To begs that very question, quite literally.
Patrick Fugit as Dwight is heartbreaking. The cracks are evident from the very beginning. His conscience weighs on him as his desire for normalcy and peace are all-consuming. Ingrid Sophie Schram as Jesse is everything we need her to be. Focused and utterly exhausted. The survival of this family unit is driven by her sense of duty and not necessarily by love this many years in. She and Fugit are brilliant scene partners. Owen Campbell as Thomas is a nuanced mix of childlike and monster. You simultaneously sympathize and loathe him. These are striking performances.
Set in the early ’90s, before Columbine was an event ingrained in history, a child’s innocence was not as easily spoiled as the kids in Super Dark Times. As someone who grew up at the same time as the main characters, I can attest to the typical dangers that surrounded our childhood. We were affected by the national news when a child was kidnapped, but that was about it. On the first evening of this year’s Fantasia Film Festival, audiences will see a film so brilliantly composed from the colors and textures of the costumes and cinematography to the incredibly disturbing storyline from screenwriters Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski. The power of an act of violence changes a person. Born from that awkward time in our lives comes the idea that fear can control the room, where the older/stronger kids ruled the proverbial schoolyards. Drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes like 
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