Director: Nichole Carlson (segment)
Release date: 2022
Contains spoilers
Clubhouse is a voice based social media app and this anthology film was born of a group on there. This means there are some level of connective aspects between the stories in the film and the one that concerns us is entitled Maternally Damned.
The segment starts with a young girl, Amara (played young by Maggie Lazo) looking scared and softly crying as we hear the sounds of labour. Her mother (Holly Conroy) is giving birth and we hear someone say that she is haemorrhaging. The baby starts to cry as the time of death is called.
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| sisters |
Cut forward and Amara (Antonia Miran) is sat in the bathroom looking worriedly at a pregnancy test. She leaves the house to see her sister, Maia (Katie Austin), in the garden, who passes her a cup of tea. Amara feels lost, she doesn’t know if she can cope with being a mother. The sisters sit with Maia’s daughter Sophie (Casey Schryer) and Maia points out that she helped her with her pregnancy and Sophie as a baby. She suggests that it is less fear of being a mother and more trauma from their mother’s death that is the issue.
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| Amara and Caz |
Amara is asked about the baby daddy and admits she doesn’t know too much about him. She met Caz (Allan Lazo) outside a bar and they hit it off, eventually coming back to hers and he was gone in the morning. Sophie reacts to the fact that he bit her and says the baby could still turn due to the umbilical cord connection – it is an intriguing and, admittedly, annoying line. Intriguing because it sounds as though vampires are a known thing (though there is no evidence that anyone works anything out through the pregnancy) and annoying because it isn’t expanded on – and I will spoil the end of the segment because there is another such moment.
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| bloody mouth |
Anyway, Amara is bought a pregnancy diary and we see her entries as the pregnancy continues. The first is morning sickness but, as she eats a salad, we see a flash in her mind of a blood dripping mouth. Week 18 and she has developed extreme sunlight sensitivities, by 22 she has nightmares and insomnia and at 23 wonders if she has become nocturnal. By week 38 she has malnutrition and strange cravings – the doctors suggesting an iron deficiency.
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| sunlight |
Maia and Sophie go to visit her and there seems to be blood on the counter. Short story shorter they find her and her waters break. The EMT come and the baby is born but in respiratory distress and one EMT takes it to the rig. Here comes the spoiler of the ending… Off screen we hear a noise and Maia and Sophie see Amara, now looking healthier but with fangs (having fed on the remaining EMT). She still has her baby bump and we see movement through her belly – eternally pregnant says Sophie.
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| turned |
That bit just didn’t square and it is because the segment doesn’t fill in the blanks – were there twins? Did the baby replenish almost like vampiric healing? It doesn’t say and the segment has ended. This could, however, have been expanded – following the pregnancy actually giving scope for a feature – and that could tell us the status of vampires in this world; known, suspected or is Sophie a romantic gothic type who believes in vampires? What was the deal with the baby being born and yet still in her womb? An eternally pregnant vampire has been done before, see Modern Vampires, but there is plenty of scope there for creativity.
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| Amara as a child |
The cast were stymied by the length, I think. The performances were solid but more room would have let them shine. I liked the idea, I thought the execution was in some ways good but, importantly, in some ways lacking and this is again a length thing. I score anthologies for the vampire segment only and this one probably deserves 5 out of 10. It was intriguing enough to have my attention but lacking elements that a longer film could have explored.
The imdb page is here.
On Demand @ Amazon US
On DVD @ Amazon UK
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