Woe betide the daughter who willingly puts herself in the path of a difficult mother. In Angela Gulner’s postpartum allegory horror The Beldham, new mom Harper (a transcendent Katie Parker) arrives with her newborn at her mother Sadie’s (Patricia Heaton) creaky, halfway-renovated home. The details are hazy, but Harper has suffered some kind of bout of psychosis whereby she nearly walked into traffic with her daughter. But in recuperation, things only get stranger for her, as she struggles to crawl her way towards stability.

The Beldham is more captivating as a drama than it is as a horror. The former is achieved through Parker’s Herculean effort at the film’s center, balancing a performance torn between insanity and desperation. Her relationship with Sadie is defined by passive aggression, their conversation persistently stilted, with her mother’s attitude towards her bordering on abuse. More confusing than Sadie’s strange behavior is the sudden appearance of Bette (Emma Fitzpatrick), an aide whose exceeding warmth seems to belie another set of secrets.

The horror elements here are dependent on its point of view inside Parker’s head, which it does decently well. Like The Father, we are forced to only focus on what is inside the frame at any given moment. But there is also an unfortunate stream of clichés: characters pulled suddenly by an invisible force, mysterious bruises, odd, inexplicable appearances of ghastly figures. Gulner’s touch for the atmospheric and dramatic is strong, but the film fumbles in its use of horror trappings to bring forth its central story.

The Beldham Succeeds Emotionally Despite Its Conventional Horror Elements

Upon arriving to her mother’s home, Harper notices a strange plethora of black birds that perch all over the house. No one else seems to notice, or care. Adding to her unease is the quiet, stern man her mother is dating (Corbin Bernsen). Between Frank and Bette and the confluence of birds, it feels as if the walls are continuously closing in on Harper. Things only get stranger when Harper becomes convinced that a haggard old bird woman is haunting her through the creaky halls, which only exacerbates the notion that she hasn’t actually recovered from her post-partum psychosis.

As in Rosemary’s Baby, Harper’s protection over her child is compounded by everyone’s seeming obsession with taking her away. After one particularly strange event in the dusty basement, Harper is locked away inside her room for a week until she can get by “without an incident.” To make the confusion feel even more palpable, Gulner shoots everything slightly off center, a strong filmic choice that induces persistent nausea. Stephen Limbaugh’s score is one of the film’s high points, a really disconcerting, yet beautiful piece of music.

The film works because of Parker, but, perhaps ironically, the most famous person in this bunch nearly sinks it. Heaton is so inexpressive and asleep that it is difficult to identify with her character’s struggle, which is a real problem considering some of the turns in the third act. Which, when they come, run the gamut from obvious twists to genuinely haunting revelations. Heaton’s performance notwithstanding, the film’s final turn manages to be both terrifying and deeply moving.

Gulner, who has five other writing credits but directs here for the first time, is a sturdy filmmaker with a solid feel for pace and tone. With The Beldham, she has crafted a clever piece of writing whose ending recontextualizes the whole film in a magnetic flash. Two twists confront us, one which is, sadly, telegraphed from quite far away; the other a wrecking ball of astounding emotional weight. Embedded within this haunted house is a parable about inherited trauma, the uncommon joy and pain of motherhood, and how intrinsically we are connected to the earth.