Sara is pregnant, and she’s overdue. Her girlfriend is concerned, and to make things worse, Sara has started seeing things and eating strange foods uncontrollably. There’s something clearly wrong, and Son of Sara wastes little time in letting you know that something bad is quickly coming up. The second-directorial feature from Canadian filmmaker Houston Bone is a gory, satanic slasher film about a queer couple and their child, who just might be the child of Satan himself.
The film runs at a tight 83 minutes leaving very little room for filler. In the opening, we see a woman giving birth and almost immediately being murdered. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It’s going to be gory, violent, and disturbing. At least, that seemed like the tone, but the direction goes a little campy from there and blends the genres too halfheartedly for either to stand out.
Sara, played by Chloe Van Landschoot (best known for her role in the MGM series FROM) plays the titular character. Chloe is a fine performer, giving Sara weight as a confused, aloof character acting not out of self-interest but rather imposed ambitions. When Sara runs into the man who impregnated her, Troy (Hemlock Grove’s Garrett Hnatuik), he invites her to his home for dinner with his mother to announce the news. Her girlfriend, Carol (played by the ever-capable Tymika Tafari), naturally disapproves and worries there may be more to this dinner than they are led to believe. This proves true when we meet Troy’s mother, Agnes (played by award-winning actress Jane Moffat) who informs us of their purpose with Sara. She is meant to give birth to the son of Satan.
Houston Bone really wanted to make a film centered around queer characters, but with such a short runtime, there isn’t a lot of time to focus on the dynamics of queerness and how it relates to this specific story. There’s a negative interpretation that one could glean from it, and I doubt that was the director’s intention, but because we’re operating with a limited budget and a small cast, there isn’t a lot of focus placed on that aspect of the characters, and it doesn’t appear that it was a major concern to anyone in the cast either. The more important aspect, it seems, was to be as unabashedly gory as humanly possible.
And it looks as if the cast had as much fun as they possibly could with that premise. There was less focus on whether much of it made sense or was necessary, as much as it was there to merely gross out the audience as much as they could. Whether it be with Sara eating raw meat or an awkward sex scene between the couple during a diaphragm check. It’s moments like these and many others that shift the tone of the film from psychological messianic horror to campy body horror.
This isn’t the layered, multi-meaning, body horror of The Substance that tackles youth, beauty, and pregnancy or the transmogrification of The Fly, this is just full-on blood and guts for the sake of blood and guts. One thing that is apparent in the edit is that at least with this cast, everyone was on board for it and delighted in it.
Son of Sara is supposed to be a part of a planned series of films which could potentially improve its standing down the road. There’s a potential story on nature vs nurture that could be explored in the next installment based on this film’s ending. But the hope is that there are some lessons learned moving forward. Hopefully, we’ll spend more time with these characters, begin to understand the role this has in their life, and maybe have the blood and guts mean something at some point. Or not, some people do enjoy the reckless, wanton violence even if it ends up feeling mostly empty.
Son of Sara is currently available on Digital platforms courtesy of Saban Films.
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Son of Sara is supposed to be a part of a planned series of films which could potentially improve its standing down the road.
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Phoenix is a father of two, the co-host and editor of the Curtain to Curtain Podcast, co-founder of the International Film Society Critics Association. He’s also a member of the Pandora International Critics, Independent Critics of America, Online Film and Television Association, and Film Independent. With the goal of eventually becoming a filmmaker himself. He’s also obsessed with musical theater.
