Adalynn (2023)

The horrific side of motherhood has been amply explored in films recently, with varying levels of success; Adalynn (2023) takes its place amongst them, and appropriately, its own success is variable. It certainly has excellent intentions, focusing its scrutiny on a new mother for whom the walls start to close in. But it quickly becomes turgid, and lacks the budget to really give clout to its metaphorical monsters: it becomes a kind of horror-adjacent, or horror-sometimes take on a woman’s postpartum existential crisis.

We begin with a birth, and get to know Adalynn (Sydney Carvill) through a voiceover, as she explains her hopes for a bright future with husband Bill (Wade Baker) and newborn Elizabeth. But her hope comes at a cost to her sense of wellbeing: she’s exhausted, she’s just undergone the physical trauma of childbirth, and she immediately struggles with how she’ll even get close to her expected ‘new normal’. There are early hints of more to this, too – of old anxieties creeping back in, triggered by the shock of motherhood, and by pregnancy and nursing nixing the medication which kept the symptoms in check. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of our common modern neuroses will recognise OCD in there, and the fatigue of keeping up with her mind’s insistence on straightening, counting and checking contributes to the sense of rigmarole Adalynn is beginning to feel, as she takes over on feeds and other tasks.

The coming flashpoint is clear and obvious: her husband is going away for a conference, leaving mother and baby alone. She says she’ll be fine, but no sooner is Bill out of the door than Adalynn is increasingly panicked. She’s struggling to bond with her daughter, and that’s bad enough, but then she begins to doubt her own sanity. Seeing and hearing odd things, she grows more and more paranoid, losing sight of herself – and fearing the worst outcome for the baby.

Adalynn throws trauma around like confetti, adding more and more plot details in its first thirty minutes until the list of life-shattering issues here is quite long. It seems there are many things which Adalynn has to contend with, and they are all present in varying degrees. As such, you are invited to ponder which, if any trauma is the real trauma, or the worst trauma, if we can call it that; the film starts out with certainties, but then decides to pull away from these, splintering into a world of missing time, flashbacks and – it has to be said – multiple false moments of closure, which are a huge detriment to the film overall. There’s just too much of this for it to hang together and retain any mystery, purpose or appeal. And yet, the film starts so stridently: you could say it goes from one extreme to another, opening with a chopsy voiceover – always a tricky beast – which spells out ideas and emotions which are perfectly clear from the unfolding film. Carvill is more than equal to the task of playing an exhausted, troubled new mother, by the way, and can get more of that across with her sheer, authentic-looking fatigue than any voiceover pointing out the same fatigue.

It’s a genre film – on balance – and as such, it’s not beholden to represent the objective truth about new motherhood, but still: it has its moments, and it’s bold enough to tackle the tiredness, the doubt and the moments of anger, even if it Can’t Go There with breastfeeding, or a realistic post-partum paunch (Carvill is trim in ways that no woman could ever be after growing a whole human). The film also does without an actual baby, come to think of it (though this can be partly justified by the film’s fantastical elements, as few as these are on the whole). There is a germ of honesty in here, though, which still deserves credit. We are socialised to think that childrearing is the greatest, most immense privilege in life – which I’m sure it is for many, but it’s a privilege which comes at a cost to many, so it could never hurt to represent the negative side of it – the pain, discomfort, shock and dismay. Likewise, let’s normalise women who have significant mental health issues pre-baby getting straight back on with the medication and the help they so clearly need to do a good job of parenting. What good is martyrdom?

Horror has always led the way with the most troubling aspects of parenthood, because it always leads the way in reflecting our darkest sensations and anxieties about our lives. In some respects, it’s a shame that Adalynn didn’t go further down the horror route in its own take; the promotional literature is a little misleading, perhaps, promising that the film “trades in a space between horror, fantasy, ghosts, demons, the Satanic occult and dreams.” That makes it sound more akin to Anything For Jackson than the film we actually get. The film we do get splinters into too many component parts and false endings, ultimately, to hold together as a horror, or a fully effective narrative – even if it has some interesting moments, a good lead performance, and some competent, if lo-fi scares.

Adalynn (2023) will be released on March 28th on digital and DVD.