The Child
2024 · 20m · Belgium
Directed by Bekim Vanbosche
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
A pregnant woman begins experiencing terrifying symptoms that require urgent medical intervention, plunging her and her doctor into a nightmare.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Body horror wrapped in medical thriller syntax—it's familiar enough to get made, subversive enough to unsettle, which means it'll probably bore me halfway through when it defaults to jump scares instead of staying weird.
Vanbosche works in the lineage of New French Extremity's corporeal dread, though the pregnancy-as-vessel premise feels more indebted to pulp than to the formal precision that would elevate this beyond genre exercise.
The decision to play the medical horror through clinical precision rather than body-cam chaos—keeping the frame steady, letting the sound design do the violation—is what separates this from standard pregnancy-horror territory.
Festivals
- Screamfest NOLA 2024, Best Short
- Screamfest LA 2025