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| Isla Fisher plays the pregnant, and in peril, Evie in Kevin Greutert's Visions (2015) |
Ah, pregnancy horror. After a film like Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's
Inside (2007), any film involving a pregnant woman in peril is going to come off as derivative. Insert Kevin Greutert's
Visions (2015), currently streaming on Netflix, a film indebted to that earlier film with some Lifetime channel haunted house stuff thrown in for good measure. The film opens with a car accident, and Evie (Isla Fisher) coming to in the hospital with the realization that she killed a baby (she has flashes of a kiddie seat, empty and askew in the road near her wreck). Cue a title card proclaiming "one year later," and Evie and her husband, David (Anson Mount), have just bought a vineyard in Paso Robles, CA as a way to start over after the earlier accident. AND Evie is newly pregnant and having a baby of her own! She's leery of medicating, even though she was on major anti-depressants after "killing a baby," as one probably would be; yet, she starts seeing weird things that suggest that she might be "losing her mind"
again, and David, in his typical way, thinks she's losing it too.
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| Evie's creepy mannequin would freak anyone out |
Hallucinations start in earnest. Nickels balance en masse on their edge, hooded figures bang on her front door, wine bottles explode, guns suddenly appear, and even mannequins attack, forcing Evie to tumble through a glass door. As her husband doesn't believe anything she says, or sees, shattering glass seems like the last straw for him, and he and Evie's smarmy doctor, played by Jim Parsons, insist that she goes back on the meds "for her own good." Meanwhile, fellow expecting mom Sadie (Gillian Jacobs) is Evie's drug free enabler, insisting that Evie knows what is best for her own body, and that she shouldn't let these
men tell her what to do! Of course, with David possibly gaslighting Evie, we side with the pregnant women, and support Evie refusing to take her meds. Yet some crazy stuff is happening in her house, and Evie's the only one who seems to see it. Coincidence??
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| Evie is a quintessential haunted heroine, broken by trauma and haunted by ghosts (maybe) |
In previous posts, I've tried to outline some of the chief characteristics of what I term "the Haunted Heroine," a repeated female figure in horror just as ubiquitous as the more well known "Final Girl." The Haunted Heroine is a fragile and sensitive soul, broken by some traumatic event, and frequently looking to start over in a new house, but seemingly haunted by spirits there. Yet
are there ghosts, or is she just crazy? On this question the entire narrative hinges, and much of the film has spectators questioning everything our female protagonist sees, says, and believes. Much of the film is spent rendering her unreliable as hell--all the other characters seem to think she's nuts, so why not spectators too. Things get so bad for Evie in
Visions, that her husband and friends perform an intervention!! They suck...but not for long, because at that very moment in the narrative, the film's super-predictable climax unfolds, and exactly what you thought would happen, does. Sigh.
***Spoilers! Turns out that Evie was partially right. She is
seeing things, but rather than ghosts or spirits, Evie is experiencing
premonitions of the future. Somehow her anti-depressants tamper with her clairvoyance, so it's a good thing she quit them. The film firmly comes down on the side of "not really crazy" (like Sadie). Even more strange, every single
woman who's lived in this house or on the property has succumbed to visions of the
exact same night, when Evie et al. are attacked by the murderously psycho Sadie and her lame boyfriend, what's-his-name. He's only there to shoot some people on Sadie's orders--and obviously because its fun for him. I felt really, really badly for Gillian Jacobs when watching this film. She deserves so much better. I'm not going to give away the ending, or what happens to Evie, but I will describe the film's last sequence. A couple are being shown the house by a realtor; "the wife/girlfriend" looks possibly pregnant, and as they pass one of the tables, the nickels (from earlier) seem to magically materialize, all balanced on their edge. This final sequence makes absolutely no sense, and throws the previous events into question AGAIN, although who knows why??? This film will never have a sequel (I hope). I appreciate the film for its haunted heroine and her traumatic travails, but I am not recommending this film unless you are looking for totally predictable genre fare with a female lead. Then, yawn-n-n-n, go for it.
