MOVIE REVIEW – Think carefully about the lullaby you sing to your child! That’s the moral of the latest horror film from director John R. Leonetti, who is also credited with the Annabelle movies. The lullaby unleashes the wrath of Lilith (Kira Guloien), the “evil” ancestress of ancient biblical legend, who was cast out of paradise and became a witch, on new parents Rachel (Oona Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter) and John (Ramón Rodríguez, also seen in Need for Speed). Both the basic story and the director sound promising, and the actors are not bad, but there are still a number of aspects that make this alto-odal ring false in many ways.

At the film’s beginning, the couple receives a packet of baby silver from Rachel’s mother. They belong to Rachel’s sister Vivian (Liane Balaban), who has lost both her child and her husband in strange circumstances. Why her mother sent them and why they would actually be used is one of life’s great mysteries.

But they do use them, especially a hymn found in an old book that seems to be the only thing that soothes little baby Eli. It’s not long before they hear voices and see strange things on the baby monitor and in the shower.

We’ve seen this many times before

Becoming a parent is one of the scariest and most stressful parts of one’s life, and the makers of The Sleep Song understand this and incorporate the effects of sleep deprivation, postpartum body image problems and the stressful fear of having a baby into the script.

The problem is that the script wastes them on things we have seen so many times before. Electronic malfunctions, a spooky baby crying in the night, the lights going out in a storm for maximum jump scare potential, an evil face peeking out of the closet. We’ve seen these so many times it’s like a YouTube montage of modern horror movies. Leonetti conscientiously tries again with these familiar jump scares and clichés, but at this point they have lost their shock value beyond cheap scares.

Judaic theme, ancient motifs

Like The Wake and The Sacrifice, The Altarpiece incorporates Judaism into the plot rather than Christianity, which gives some scenes, such as the consultation with Rabbi John Cohen (Alex Karzis, Detention, Orphan Black), a freshness. But, unlike the other two films, Altarpiece doesn’t carry this theme much further. Rather than rooting the plot deeply in the history of the Kabbalah, they just replace a few names in an oft-told story that is not innovative or at least original enough on a minimal level to make the story feel fresh.

It’s a shame, because the Altar Song has a convincingly dark, atmospheric feel. Cinematographer Michael Galbraith gets a lot out of the apartment in which much of the film takes place. He turns the improbably large and spacious rooms into an edition of darkness where anything can hide, and the corridors into a prelude to the other world the film inevitably ends up in.

The dolls are lame, Lilith is okay, but the story is too predictable

And in this darkness lurks something, Lilith’s own deformed children, who serve as her minions. They’re supposed to be the most terrifying, but the film’s CGI is not up to the task, so the deformed babies are nowhere near as terrifying as Leonetti’s Annabelle doll. There’s also a scene in a room full of dolls that, whether due to lame CGI or equally poor cinematic effects, look so much like cheap rubber dolls that I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

Apart from this glitch, the Altarpiece is visually exciting enough, and Lilith’s old sniffy witch is scary enough, but the uninspiring and predictable story, which is far behind other similar films, unfortunately still drag the film down. It also adds to the feeling that Annabelle was an accidentally well-made monster, and Leonetti – who made his directorial debut with the equally dull Mortal Kombat: Annihilation – should consider returning to cinematography, where he dazzled audiences with much more impressive work.

-BadSector-