Director: Peter Howitt Screenplay: Will Honley and April Maguire Cast: Nathalie Emmanuel, Eloise Lovell Anderson, Charlie Hiscock, Ben Cura, Adam Woodward, Tina Gray Year: 2026
Some films leave you stranded in the middle, and those are the hardest to grade. "Confinement" has genuinely good things in it, an opening and a close that work, and I still spent a large part of its runtime waiting for it to commit to being the film it obviously knew how to be. I'd have liked to give it a better mark. Honestly, I can't, and the reason fits in one word: the middle.
In "Confinement" we follow Stella (Nathalie Emmanuel), a pregnant woman whose husband is handling impending fatherhood badly. At a breaking point he leaves the house to clear his head and causes a fatal crash that looks far more like a suicide than an accident. Not long after, his family turns up, the same family he had deliberately kept at a distance while he was alive, and now they want to meet her, meet their dead relative's child, and take her to their house for a few days to see her through the rest of the pregnancy. Stella agrees. The house turns out to be a mansion, and the family dynamic turns out, from day one, to be particular.
The best thing the film does is the doubt. For almost the entire runtime you don't know whether what the family maintains has any basis or whether you're watching a group of people who are simply unwell, and Will Honley and April Maguire's script keeps that question open until practically the final minutes. It's a risky bet, because it asks the viewer to sit without confirmation, and when the confirmation lands the effect is double: the character's doubt and the viewer's resolve at the same moment. I liked that last stretch a lot. There are a couple of details in the close that don't quite line up with what came before, but the whole thing sticks its landing.
The problem is how we get there. "Confinement" opens with an excellent, explosive scene that puts you in exactly the right register. Then the pacing drops from a nine to a two and stays there for close to an hour. That hour goes to the family, the characters and the dynamic of the house, which in principle is exactly what a film like this should be doing. The trouble is that it stretches well past what the material can hold, and there comes a point where Stella staying stops being plausible: anyone in that situation, with that many accumulated signals, would have left long before. The film needs her to stay, and you can feel it needing that.
On top of it there's the score, which across that same stretch is overly dramatic, at times flatly wrong for the scene, and mixed louder than it should be. It ends up distracting from moments that would land better with less. The performances neither help nor hurt: some are good, some didn't convince me, and the average is an average. Nathalie Emmanuel carries what the script asks without the script asking much.
Structurally this is pregnancy horror, the strain where hospitality is the trap and the woman ends up surrounded by people far too interested in her body. "Rosemary's Baby" (1968) still defines that shape, and "Confinement" moves inside its rules without trying to bend them. Set against "Huesera: The Bone Woman", which uses pregnancy to talk about what motherhood demands of a woman, this is a film far less interested in the subject and far more interested in the mechanism. And set against "Hereditary", which also works the idea of a family dragging something down through generations, it lacks the precision with which Ari Aster makes every domestic scene carry the weight of what's coming.
The poster deserves its own mention, because it's a real misstep. It looks AI-generated and it looks like the artwork for a soap opera, not a horror film. Seeing it makes you want to watch this less, and in a market where the poster is the first and sometimes the only shot at catching anyone, that matters.
Anyone with patience for a long build who wants a mystery that confirms nothing until the end will find a competent film here with a close that pays. Anyone who needs a film to keep its pulse will bail during that middle hour, and honestly I won't blame them. The ending is good, but it doesn't fully compensate for what you cross to reach it. Good opening, good ending, soft middle.
Rating: 5/10
Ending Explained (Spoilers ahead)
What the family is hiding is an inherited curse: in every generation, one of the births isn't a child but an incarnation of something evil. It isn't a metaphor, and it isn't a superstition the film debunks. It's literal, and it explains the insistence with which they take Stella in.
Stella and the other pregnant woman in the house, married to one of the family's men, are the first two births of this generation. Hence the fascination both of them register and find so uncomfortable: the family isn't watching them, it's watching to see which of the two babies it will be. There's also a rule the script establishes carefully, that only those of that bloodline can tell a normal newborn from one that isn't. Everyone else, Stella included, sees nothing.
It also explains the dead husband's sister, who wants to be a mother and won't let herself get pregnant. She isn't waiting for the right moment. She's waiting for somebody else to carry the risk first.
The other woman gives birth and her baby is fine. From that moment every eye in the house turns to Stella, and the film finally collects the tension it had been rationing. When Stella gives birth, the character who had defended her most, the brother who kept insisting the whole thing was family folklore and invented nonsense, looks at the newborn and his face says everything. He can see what Stella cannot. That reaction is the simultaneous confirmation for him and for the viewer, who has spent the film doubting exactly as she has.
Stella reads that reaction and understands something is wrong, but she refuses to accept it and pushes herself into believing her child is perfectly fine. The film closes by showing strange things beginning to happen around her, a second confirmation that no longer depends on anyone else's eyes. What the family said was true, and Stella is still inside it.
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