The Clinic

A horror film with several neat twists and one that strains credulity to breaking point, The Clinic starts weakly, but quickly builds into a tension-packed ride. The premise of the story is suitably twisted. Six women are kidnapped and locked away in an old deserted abbatoir. They’re all pregnant, and their babies are taken from them. When they wake up, one of them is told a nasty fact. The babies are in the building, but there’s only one way to tell one from another. They’ve been given coloured tags, and the corresponding tag has been left inside the womb of the mother. The only way to find your baby is to kill the other women, dig out the tags, and work it out by a process of elimination. Four of the women don’t know the rules, one is dead already, and the remaining one is stalking her companions in misery. And surveillance cameras are watching their every move. As far as sick and twisted schemes go, this one is pretty high up the list.

The setup allows for set-piece after set-piece of tense creeping around, as Beth and her compatriots try to find their children and a way out of the nightmare they’ve been plunged into. For the most part it’s effective stuff, though a chase by some nasty dogs is kind of annoying. There’s some pretty gruesome bits too, especially when one of the women attempts to dig out the tag from her own belly with the aid of a mirror and scalpel. Less successful are the elements where Cameron attempts to turn the tables on his captors and ride to the rescue. While initially promising, the way it ends up is unsatisfying and far too ambiguous until the final scenes tell you something that could have been said with a lot more punch (and a lot less slow motion) earlier.

What holds the film together is the solid performances of the three central women. Beth, Veronica (Freya Stafford) and Ivy (Clare Bowen) are interesting characters. They hold the attention, even when the plot spirals out into pure silliness. The final scenes and the revelations contained therein undermine a fairly interesting if outlandish concept. To explain it would be to spoil it, but suffice to say that it’s fairly laughable. The upside is it allows for a snappy one-liner and a nasty revenge kill, and to be fair, Beth by this point has earned a chance at a hero moment.

The Clinic is a fairly orthodox horror/thriller with an unorthodox setting. There’s good and bad to be found in it, and it’s slow to get started, but once underway it’s an enjoyable ride.

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