Tuesday, December 06, 2022

Bed Rest, on Tubi

Julie Rivers is supposed to stay in bed and avoid stress, but she has a cat. Have you ever lived with one of those? They’re always stepping on you, in uncomfortable places. She also lives with some kind of angry ghost, but nobody believes her, because of her mental history. As a result, she must face it without the help of her condescending husband in director-screenwriter Lori Evans Taylor’s Bed Rest, which premieres tomorrow on Tubi.

Julie and Daniel Rivers lost their first baby a few years ago. Since then, he has been compulsively moving on, whereas she still feels the loss keenly. Since she is mega-preggers, they logically just moved into huge fixer-upper in the middle of nowhere. One fateful night, they get a scare on the staircase, but her doctor assures them all will be fine if Rivers confines herself to bed for the duration of her pregnancy.

If only it were that easy. First, she hears intruders in the lower floors. Before long, she is visited by a very strange little boy, whom she takes to be the spirit of her late, stillborn son. Of course, her husband and their visiting nurse Delmy (who is prone to oversharing) just assume she is having manic episodes, like before. However, we can tell there must be something to it, or the film would really be wasting our time (it happens, but mercifully not in this case).

Nonetheless,
Bed Rest feels very familiar. A lot of the film is devoted to Rivers’ husband and Delmy basically trying to gaslight her back to normal. Obviously, it doesn’t work, but the film spends a heck of a lot of time spinning its wheels with these scenes.

On the plus side, Taylor creates some nicely moody atmosphere. The shadowy figures are skillfully framed, to build tension without revealing too much. Technically, it is well executed, but Taylor’s narrative will totally unremarkable to any horror fan.

Melissa Barrera (from
Scream 2022) is pretty solid as the bed-ridden Rivers, while Edie Inksetter effectively ambiguous as the hard-to-pigeonhole Delmy. However, there is only so much they can do with such a conventional concept.

Granted,
Bed Rest is better than a whole lot of other horror films released this year. It is competent, but it isn’t special. There’s just not enough to recommend when Bed Rest starts streaming tomorrow (12/7) on Tubi.