Isabelle (2018)

Larissa (Amanda Crew) and Matt Kane (Adam Brody) have just moved into their new suburban home, which they bought to have more room for their new-born that’s going to pop any day now. Alas, when the supposedly creepy daughter (Zoë Belkin) of their strange neighbour looks at Larissa would-be creepily from an upstairs window, something happens, and Larissa has a miscarriage.

Not surprisingly completely bereft, and brought back into a completely empty home where she is left utterly alone, Larissa first begins to hallucinate the crying of a baby in what was supposed to be the nursery, and sometimes even hallucinates a teddy bear into a merry little baby. She quickly becomes convinced that the creepy daughter, who turns out to be paraplegic and mute after her long dead father abused her and, as a helpful online newspaper article exposits, “dedicated her to Satan”, is sending her very bad vibes. And wouldn’t you know it, she just might be right!

I’m not usually one to get out the morality club when talking about genre movies, but when a film like Robert Heydon’s Isabelle uses things like a stillbirth and the following mental illness of the mother as the basic for its tale of possession, I do expect it to either put actual effort into what it does or leave things well enough alone, or put it into the hands of better filmmakers, respectively. Unfortunately, these filmmakers didn’t, instead leaving us with this odious mess that exploits some terrible shit that happens to actual people often enough without even being terribly good exploitation.

The script is a complete mess, with characters that change their opinions and basic traits randomly from scene to scene, a plot that takes ages to get to a point the audience has seen coming half an hour ago, and a structure that simply doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the passage of time. Now, (improbable) defenders of this mess might argue that some of these weaknesses might be explained by the film’s ending that suggests these things haven’t been completely real, but I know a crap horror movie kicker ending that has nothing to do with the film that came before it when I see one; I have, after all, by now witnessed hundreds of them.

The worst example of the script’s failings is probably the character of Matt, played by Brody with all the bafflement any sane person would feel when encountering his scripted behaviour. Matt’s the kind of guy who, when he finds his wife acting strangely shortly after the stillbirth, grabs the next priest he can find, mumbles something about possession and asks the guy to visit his wife and him, only to then, when the priest arrives the next day, argue there’s no such thing as possession, and his wife only suffers from grief, without anything having changed in the scenes in between. Even better is the moment later in the film when the very same guy who brought up possession in the first place also explains he doesn’t believe in “this woo-woo stuff”. Do I have to add that the film also sees fit to have him go into the mandatory speech about how he can’t cope with his wife’s behaviour any longer even before their damn kid is even buried!? But then, he’s also the kind of guy who leaves his wife completely alone the day she comes out of the hospital after a stillbirth without him or the film giving much of a reason for that apart from him just having started a new job. The film clearly can’t see there’s anything strange about that at all; it’s as if this was written by aliens.

And let’s not even get me started on the film’s general treatment of Larissa’s mental unravelling, how badly it is timed and structured, and how little sense it makes on a psychological level. But then, what do filmmaking aliens know about us strange hu-mans?


Because that’s clearly not bad enough, Isabelle also fails at the most basic element of even the dumbest horror flick: being at least a wee bit scary or disturbing. Heydon just can’t seem to be able to time anything right when it comes to scaring his audience. Even the most primitive jump scare doesn’t sit, more complex set-ups fall plainly into the realm of the ridiculous, the possessed ghost girl make-up of Isabelle is just silly with an added heap total ridiculousness whenever her red flashlight eyes start digitally glowing. It’s pretty astonishing how a film that should be full of psychologically disturbing stuff can’t even get simple fun house scares right, but that’s Isabelle for you. To be fair, neither Heydon nor writer Donald Martin have much, if any, experience with horror, but that’s not really much of an excuse after I’ve had to sit through this one.