If you’ve ever thought, “Motherhood seems hard,” The Beldham gently replies, “Sure, and also there might be a beaked witch in the attic who wants your baby.” Angela Gulner’s debut is a tight, unnerving, darkly funny psychological horror that treats new motherhood like the haunted house it so often feels like—full of noises, shadows, and relatives who may or may not be making things worse.
Welcome Home, Please Ignore the Bird-Witch
New mum Harper does what desperate, exhausted people always do in horror movies: she moves somewhere “quiet” to “start fresh.” In this case, that’s her family’s fading rural farmhouse, where her mother Sadie is halfway through a renovation and all the way through being over it. Bette, a pregnant live-in caregiver, rounds out the household, because nothing says “stable environment” like two mothers-to-be in one decaying property with a lot of unresolved feelings.
From the first creak, the house works as a character: sagging floors, unfinished walls, and the constant sense that it’s held together with nails, memories, and bad decisions. Things start small—odd noises, weird drafts, glimpses of a wrongness just out of frame. Then Harper begins seeing what looks like a tall, beak-faced figure, the folkloric Beldham: an old crone who feeds on infants, sort of like if the Baba Yaga had a baby-specific side hustle.Is it real? Is Harper sliding into a breakdown? The film refuses to answer quickly, and that’s half the fun.
Postpartum Horror with Its Claws Out
Plenty of horror films have dipped into “stressed mum + weird kid + maybe a monster” territory, but The Beldham feels less like it’s copying The Babadook and more like it’s trading war stories with it. Gulner leans hard into postpartum anxiety and psychosis: Harper has already had one dangerous episode before we even arrive, and the film treats that history seriously, not as a cheap gotcha.
The dark joke is that, from Harper’s point of view, motherhood itself is already a haunted condition. She’s sleep-deprived, hormonal, scared of herself, and marinating in guilt. Drop her into a creaky farmhouse with a centuries-old baby-eating witch legend and you don’t need jump scares—the premise itself is a panic attack.
Gulner lets the supernatural blend with the psychological so thoroughly that every moment has a double edge. Is that scratching in the wall a rat, a hallucination, or a witch tapping her beak like, “Room service?”
Katie Parker vs. The Void
Katie Parker gives one of those performances where you can watch someone’s grip on reality fray in real time. As Harper, she’s brittle and funny and terrifyingly fragile, always one bad night away from collapse. Critics have already singled her out as “transcendent,” and it’s not hyperbole; she carries the film like a mom hauling groceries, a baby, and a lifetime of trauma up three flights of stairs.
Her face does most of the special effects work: tiny flinches, forced smiles, moments where you can see her recalibrating what’s real and what she’s willing to admit is real. When she insists she’s fine, it’s both heartbreaking and darkly comic—like watching someone say, “This is just a phase,” about a demon trying to breastfeed on their soul.
Patricia Heaton, Professional Mom, But Make It Creepy
Casting Patricia Heaton as Sadie is a stroke of perverse genius. Sitcom America’s Favorite TV Mom now plays the mother you go home to when you’re dangerously unwell—only to learn that the family tree has more thorns than branches. Sadie is loving but controlling, supportive but dismissive at exactly the wrong moments.
Heaton doesn’t go big; she goes specific. A slightly too-tight smile, a comment that lands like a slap, a refusal to acknowledge just how bad things are getting—she embodies that uniquely horrifying question: “What if going home to Mum doesn’t actually save you?” It’s no wonder she’s already picked up festival hardware for the role. The Beldham Herself: Witch, Symbol, or Both?
The monster design is delightfully nasty: a bird-like crone, angular and wrong, popping up in corners like a corrupted version of the classic “kindly old lady” archetype. The film opens by defining “beldam” as an old woman, a witch, and then spends the rest of its runtime asking how much of that label is misogyny… and how much is well-earned. On one level, the Beldham is pure folklore—a soul-eater lurking on the edges of rural life. On another, she’s every intrusive thought Harper has about failing as a mother, about being a danger to her child. The creature seems to slip in whenever Harper is weakest, like depression made flesh and bird-skull.
The film’s dark humor lives here too. There’s something grimly funny about an ancient witch showing up like, “You’re not using that baby, right?” while Harper clings to it as the one good thing in her collapsing reality.
One House, Many Ghosts
Gulner and cinematographer Ksusha Genenfeld use the single-location setup like a stage play from the underworld. Hallways stretch just a bit too long. Doorways frame characters like they’re walking into a trap. Renovation tarps and exposed beams give everything the feel of a home mid-autopsy.
The sound design is particularly mean: the thump of footsteps above, the faint scraping in the walls, the creak of wood that sounds uncomfortably like a breath. There aren’t many big “boo!” moments; instead, the film erodes your nerves slowly, like water damage you only notice once the ceiling caves in.
Tragi-Horror: Bring Tissues, Not Just Nerves
Several reviewers have described The Beldham/The House at Hallow End as “tragi-horror,” and that’s exactly right. By the final act, you realize the movie has been setting you up less for a giant scare and more for an emotional wrecking ball.
Without spoiling specifics, the climax takes everything you thought you knew about what was real, what was in Harper’s head, and who was actually in danger, and reframes it in a way that’s both horrifying and deeply sad. The monster isn’t just the Beldham; it’s untreated trauma, intergenerational silence, and the way families sometimes sacrifice the truth to preserve the illusion of “being okay.”
You come in expecting a haunted-house story and leave feeling like you just watched a very intense therapy session set on fire. In a good way.
A Debut That Knows Exactly What It Is
For a first feature, The Beldham is shockingly assured. Gulner knows she doesn’t have Marvel money, so she plays to her strengths: a small cast, one main location, folklore with teeth, and emotions dialed up to “ruin your evening.” The influences—The Babadook, Don’t Look Now, grief-horror in general—are there, but the film never feels like a copy. It feels like an angry little cousin with its own scars to show you. And while it’s not packed with jump scares, it lingers. The image of that beaked figure at the edge of the frame, the sound of the house settling at night, Harper’s wild-eyed insistence that she can handle it—those stay with you in ways a loud orchestra sting never will.
Final Verdict: Beware the Witch, But Fear the Feelings
The Beldham is the rare horror film that’s as interested in your heart as it is in your adrenal glands. It’s about motherhood, yes—but also about how families mishandle pain; how women’s suffering is pathologized, doubted, and occasionally left to rot in old houses until it grows a beak and crawls out of the walls.
It’s dark, sad, occasionally very funny in a “wow, that’s bleak” way, and anchored by performances that refuse to let the film sink into mere genre exercise. If you’ve ever looked at an old family home and thought, “There are too many memories in here; one of them is going to bite me,” this movie is your worst fear, lovingly illustrated.
Just… maybe don’t watch it alone, in a creaky house, with a baby monitor on. And if you hear scratching in the walls afterward? Don’t worry. It’s probably nothing. Probably.
