Review: ‘The Beldham’ turns motherhood into a postpartum nightmare

Writer/director Angela Gulner’s The Beldham is one of the year’s biggest surprises. Fitting somewhere between Relic and Goodnight Mommy, the indie feature taps into mental decay, a mother’s primal senses, and postpartum psychosis. Its effectiveness relies heavily on Gulner’s taut, character-driven script that uncovers the insidious fear stemming from memory loss and the cruelty of human existence. The cast, which includes Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond) and Katie Parker (The Haunting of Hill House, The Fall of the House of Usher), digs their teeth into the material with remarkable urgency.

Harper (Parker) comes to stay with her mother Sadie (Heaton), as she’s in severe physical decline. Harper gets a surprise when she learns that Sadie is not only living with her boyfriend, Frank (Corbin Bernsen), but has also hired a live-in home health aide, Bette (Emma Fitzpatrick). Along with her infant child, Harper moves into an extra bedroom for an undetermined period, offering to help finish up the house so Sadie can put it on the market. From the start, tensions between them indicate a storied past of trouble and anguish. Harper just wants her mother properly cared for, and Sadie hopes to instill some of her motherly instincts into her daughter’s life.

It doesn’t take long for something sinister to emerge from the darkness and rattle Harper. Then, there’s the matter of her finding crows around the house and crows flying into her bedroom window. As she grows increasingly paranoid, she expresses her anxieties to Sadie, who heartlessly brushes off Harper’s concerns. When her delusions escalate, it becomes evident that she could be a danger to her child, and these visual manifestations of postpartum nearly swallow her whole. The film quickly careens into the third act, delivering a shocking about-face. What you thought was true is nothing more than a shadow of the past.

Gulner uses various storytelling misdirects to transmit a twisty narrative greatly inspired by her own grandmother. As such, the film feels deeply, tragically personal in a way that’s viscerally charged, owed in large part to Heaton’s and Parker’s emotionally confrontational performances. It also helps that there’s a visual throughline that further heightens the story’s high-stakes—also courtesy of cinematographer Ksusha Genenfeld’s work. Together, the creative team unleashes a beast of a film that’s largely flown under the radar for an inexplicable reason.

The Beldham operates in an almost illusory state. Angela Gulner crafts such a compelling world that uses genre tropes and conventions to lull you into a false sense of reality. On the surface, it’s your typical haunted house story, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Down below, there’s something far more psychologically maddening taking root. The soil out in the flowerbed is rotten, and under the tainted earth, there lies Harper in a manic state. Or so it seems.