When the Bough Breaks

What it's about:

John and Laura Taylor are a young, professional couple, and they desperately want a baby. After exhausting all other options, they finally hire Anna, the perfect woman to be their surrogate, but, as she gets further along in her pregnancy, so too does her psychotic and dangerous fixation on the husband. The couple becomes caught up in Anna’s deadly game and must fight to regain control of their future before it’s too late.

What we thought:

The surrogacy industry is only highlighted in the media when things go wrong, and When the Bough Breaks taps into that fear of losing your last chance at having your own child. It’s difficult to ascertain whether or not the filmmakers were trying to highlight the problems with laws surrounding surrogacy or whether they are against the whole practice, but in the end their story suffered clumsy writing, misplaced theatrics and heavily dependent on the sexy factor to sell the movie.

The Taylors have tried everything to have their own child, and are down to their last viable embryo. After finally finding a surrogate mother, they are elated by the prospect of parenthood. However, the surrogate and her boyfriend have other plans for the baby, and soon a dangerous obsession starts to blossom.

It’s not hard to predict how this movie plays out – innocent-but-sexy girl turns out to be psycho – and the writers don’t even really attempt to give this thriller any form of fresh twist. Although, the female characters were slightly more interesting than leading man Morris Chestnut, whose character as the devoted husband was such a bland portrayal of a man tempted by lust, and yet it still manages to be extremely cliché. Regina Hall, who plays the wife, and Jaz Sinclair, who plays the surrogate, was easier to watch. Still, it brought nothing new to a genre that has been slowly dying since the 2000s.

Director Jon Cassar might have made a big name for himself with his Emmy-winning series 24, but he clearly didn’t make every second count in When the Bough Breaks. The slow pace tried to establish and build the characters’ motivations, which worked up to a point, but the predictability of the plot resulted in an audience that only half-watched the movie, getting easily distracted by their own thoughts.

A straight-to-late-night-etv-movie, When The Bough Breaks offers its audience nothing new and exciting except some sexy outfits and a lot of side-eye. If you’ve seen any stalker movie where some young piece of ass worms their way into a loving couple’s life, then you’ve already seen this movie. Except this time it’s a pregnant belly in sexy lingerie.