To his credit, John seems more wary than his wife is, and only becomes more so after Laura invites Anna and Mike over for dinner and the two men share a tense moment alone.
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Laura is so convinced they’ve found the one, she quickly meets with the girl in person, not even calling John about it until after the fact. It means a lot to her to be able to give the Taylors something. As she says to Laura soon after, she’s never had anything anybody else wanted before. She handles herself elegantly in a requisite pre-interview, which Laura watches remotely with a doctor, ostensibly fully understanding and embracing the responsibilities and limitations of surrogacy. At least, they truly hope they found her at this point, they only have one embryo left.Īnna is twenty-one, new to the city, and engaged to Mike (Theo Rossi, “ Cloverfield”), who is about to be deployed overseas. After years of attempting to conceive in spite of demanding careers, multiple miscarriages, and other hardships, the Taylors seem to have found the perfect surrogate in Anna Walsh (Jaz Sinclair, “Paper Towns”), a young woman their doctors think would be a good fit. When the Bough Breaks is the story of Laura (Regina Hall, “ Barbershop: The Next Cut”) and John (Morris Chestnut, “ Kick-Ass 2”) Taylor, a kind, beautiful, philanthropic, slightly older power couple, and their quest to have a baby. I didn’t feel excited again until I saw the credits appear I’d spent the second half of the movie’s run time just itching to stand up and leave. Unfortunately, what begins as mystery ferments into mess, and despite some truly wonderful acting, a striking setting, and initially suspense augmenting subplots and stakes ends both abruptly and far too long after once wide audience eyes will have begun to roll. The pacing was slow, the main characters sympathetic and endearing, the villain of the film intriguing and mysterious. When I first sat down in the theater, I was still excited. It looked like “ Obsessed,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” or “Single White Female,” except with fewer white people (something most movies these days could benefit from). In other circumstances the details of her troubled past would inspire someone to seek help for her, but here they’re merely a splat of info overload designed to further the preposterous plot.When I first saw the trailers for When the Bough Breaks, I was excited. But mainly he provides the “aha!” backstory on the increasingly problematic Anna. Williams, playing a friend of John’s who does investigative work, makes a few hilariously sudden appearances just when he’s needed. In a throwaway part as John’s rival at the law firm, Romany Malco gets to wear well-tailored suits. The human characters are barely more fleshed out than the sacrificial feline. He telegraphs Anna’s muddled malevolence - most egregiously in the ample attention he pays Laura’s elderly cat, who’s rather charmingly named Miss Havisham and clearly won’t go gentle into that good night. Working from a screenplay by Jack Olsen that’s constructed from recycled ideas, cheap shots and zero compassion, director John Cassar spotlights his able cast’s good looks, along with some striking Louisiana locations.
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Practiced in the art of self-help affirmations, she’s not taking no for an answer. Once the Taylors have made her comfy in their guesthouse, Anna makes the moves on John. Her twitchy fiancé (Theo Rossi) is a red flag to John or anyone else paying attention, but Laura is so eager to start a family, and so convinced that Anna’s the answer to her prayers, that soon the two women are bonding over the embryo implantation procedure and going to yoga classes together. Anna ( Jaz Sinclair) first appears in pastel pink with the crinkly smile of a good Samaritan.