FILM REVIEW: THE LULLABY

Lullaby. A film which doesn’t need one.

1901, Reitfontein concentration camp, a baby is murdered, its neck is broken and it is thrown off a cliff. In a voiceover… “If one of us fell pregnant, the Priest and the Midwife would make certain that the baby would never see a sunrise” The scene is of white people in clean clothes holding back the mother whilst the Priest gives the usual bullshit about sin, and then the baby gets killed and dumped. I’m surprised that they chose that to begin a film with as at the Reitfontein Camp the death of children was a daily thing with many months seeing child mortality rates in the hundreds, sometimes going into thousands. Disease, malnutrition, exposure, lack of medical care and various other causes resulted in around a third of the population dying, with children representing 81% of the deaths at the ‘Black camps’. There’s enough horror there without having to invent any.

Cut to modern day, a delivery room and a woman in labour. Chloe (Reine Swart) has the baby and rejects it. Her estranged mom Ruby (Thandi Puren) takes charge in spite of being pissed off that her daughter won’t say who the father is, and is seemingly incapable of doing even the most basic things new mothers should do such as clipping the baby’s nails, using a breast milk pump et cetera. She is (and looks) totally exhausted because the baby never stops crying. It’s all stuff we’ve seen before a dozen times, and there’s actually nothing new to see here.

I think a big warning regarding this film is that it comes from the same director as ‘Dracula 3000’, so yeah, it ain’t good. The acting is good, never quite good enough to elevate the mundane plot, but certainly not among the worst. It does give a bunch of scares, however they are mostly jump-scares and I’m probably not alone in thinking that they are generally present at the expense of actual proper scares which require a depth to them that this film fails to adequately convey.

Think back to the beginning, and to an actual horror which really happened. Surely with Reitfontein as the basis for the fictitious intro there could have been such a lot of ties to it throughout, but there wasn’t. No ‘angry spirits rising en-masse’, just a bunch of hallucinations about an evil old woman who wants Chloe to kill the baby.

The Lullaby isn’t dire. It’s watchable, but it is nothing new.

Currently available as VOD.

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