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HORROR PICK:
From Satan’s son to Xenomorphs, birth horror has had a hell of a run at the movies. Rarer, though, is psycho-fertility horror about the insidious pressures on ambivalent women to procreate. In Clock, those forces accost successful interior designer Ella (Dianna Agron) from all angles—moneyed mommy culture in the morning, Dad’s wistful broken-lineage speeches at night.
These are realistic forms of duress, but Clock heightens them, rendering Ella defenseless to make choices or communicate clearly. Though the 37-year-old has never much wanted kids, she quickly wants to want them and enrolls in a biotech trial under the wonderfully petrifying gaze of Melora Hardin (The Office). Just some exposure therapy and synthetic hormones, and baby fever is guaranteed.
Unfortunately, Clock fails to get visually or sensorially freaky à la the Alex Garland and Julia Ducournau influences looming over its settings and subject matters. (Points, though, for Ella’s raw-egg obsession and one memorable sexual mishap.)
Instead, writer-director Alexis Jacknow’s debut film is full of big ideas—especially the compelling theme of Ella’s childless guilt being complicated by her Judaism—but in the execution can’t connect them. It’s left to play hot potato with Ella’s agency, biology and identity, separating and conflating them on a twist-driven thriller’s shaky whim. Hulu.
