The Beldham opens with a title card, informing us of the meaning of its title: “Beldham” (alternatively spelled “beldam”)—an old woman; a witch. It immediately clues us in to what kind of monster we may be dealing with in this indie horror gem.
Directed by Angela Gulner in her feature debut, the movie follows Harper (played excellently by Mike Flanagan regular Katie Parker), a woman who’s recently given birth and moves into an old house that her aging mother (Patricia Heaton) is in the process of flipping with the help of her new boyfriend (Corbin Bernsen) and a live-in aide (Emma Fitzpatrick).
With that setup, you might expect a run-of-the-mill haunted house story, but The Beldham isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. As a strange presence lurking within the house begins to reveal itself to Harper, it’s her own mind that starts to come into question—and it becomes clear that there’s more going on than meets the eye.
One thing I appreciated about the movie is its use of setting. The whole movie takes place in the aforementioned house, and, while I’m sure that’s partly due to budgetary constraints, it makes the movie more focused and gives it a concrete sense of place.
Like the best haunted house stories, however, it’s unclear if it’s the house or the psyche of its inhabitants that’s haunted. As one character puts it: “the brain is a wild beast.” In The Beldham, the mind itself is cast as a monster. Is Harper really seeing a witch or is it in her head? Can it be both? Is there something else entirely going on? For most of the film, that ambiguity drives the action, blurring the lines between the natural and the supernatural.
That central metaphor not only makes for interesting narrative tension but also allows for deeper exploration of the movie’s themes.
It’s easy to position the film in a line of modern-day motherhood-themed horror movies, but The Beldham reminded me most not of a movie, but of one of my favourite short stories—Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
First published in 1892, the story is about a woman suffering from what we’d now call postpartum depression but was then diagnosed as a form of hysteria. To treat it, her doctor, like Gilman’s real-life doctor, prescribes a “rest cure,” during which she’s prohibited from writing. The unnamed narrator, like Gilman, is a writer, so not being able to write, and being confined inside the asylum-like house she and her husband move into, causes her mind to slowly deteriorate in what is one of the greatest feminist psychological horror stories ever written. The key to its power lies in its ambiguity—is the narrator losing her mind? Or are there supernatural forces at work in the house? You can interpret it either way, and that’s what makes the story so effective.
My favourite kind of story lives in that gray area between the natural and supernatural, and The Beldham fits into that storytelling tradition beautifully. It feels hewn from the same stuff that Gilman’s short story is: grief and rage and confusion and anger. The painful realities of motherhood and aging, of being a woman, and the archetypes that we’ve been cast into for ages, since long before even Gilman’s time—the mad-woman, the old crone, the beldham.
It’s the stuff that the best horror stories are usually made of. As Gulner herself puts it, horror is “the internal made external.” This—this is exactly why I love the genre. Horror, maybe more than any other genre, is so good at taking the internal—the emotional and psychological realities we experience—and externalizing it through metaphor and fantasy, making complex human experiences more intelligible through the inhuman and profane.
While The Beldham doesn’t reinvent the formula, its particular mixture of elements felt pretty fresh to me. In fact, the movie genuinely surprised me, with a narrative turn that I didn’t see coming. In today’s movie landscape, it’s a real feat for a movie to surprise its audience, and on that front, The Beldham succeeded for me where so many other recent horror movies have failed by being overly predictable. Sure, the beats here are familiar, but the movie is smartly written and confidently directed.
Some of the creative flourishes—I’m thinking particularly of a few recurring dream sequences with very striking visuals and cinematography, as well as the sound design throughout the movie, not to mention that final shot and credits sequence—show just how creative you can get with a small budget and a single setting.
Another thing I appreciated is that the movie isn’t afraid to take its time as well. For having a short runtime of 85 minutes, the pace feels a bit slow at times, but its considered approach gives the characters more room to breathe. I was mostly compelled and on-board with the central relationships, although some of the characters (particularly the boyfriend) feel superfluous and lacking in depth. I did, however, appreciate that all of the main relationships are between women—mothers and daughters and caretakers—which is itself still something of a rarity to see.
The performances here also stand out. I was especially impressed with Parker, who proves to be a capable lead in a role that demands a layered performance. Heaton is also great, at turns cold-hearted and almost villainous, and at other times, more of a caring mother figure, walking a fine line to great effect by the end.
Like “The Yellow Wallpaper”, The Beldham is interested in the complex emotional realities of its characters, and it uses the tropes of haunted houses and witchcraft to explore larger themes of motherhood, aging, loss, and intergenerational trauma. Ultimately, this is a very solid debut, and I’m very jazzed to see more women-focused horror movies that are actually directed and made by women filmmakers.
Verdict
While The Beldham is more chilling and emotional than outright scary, and it treads some familiar ground, it’s also a surprisingly confident feature debut with some great performances and cool visuals and sound on an indie budget. It’s the rare movie these days that actually surprised me with its narrative turns. If you like your horror to be more on the suspenseful and psychological side, then you’ll probably enjoy this indie thriller.
Shea Angus