The Overlook Film Festival 2023 Film Review

Stunning visual flourishes and masterfully interwoven themes make sure this edgy body clock shocker delivers an intense horror high.

Ella is a gorgeous and talented woman in a rewarding marriage. She is also 37 and childless. Battered by pressure from friends, family, social media, peers, and ultimately herself she is coerced into overthinking her decision to rebuke motherhood.

Consequently, she is told during a smear test that her biological clock is “broken” but could possibly be mended. Made to feel she is selfish for her life choices and painted as someone who needs “fixing” Ella allows herself to be influenced by the will of those around her.

It is suggested to Ella that her lack of desire to procreate is a form of mental illness and should be treated as a fertility issue rather than be seen as a reasonable act of autonomy. This in turn leads her into the clutches of the overly empathetic Dr. Simmons and her quite frankly reckless methodology of practice.

Ella takes a clandestine trip to her paradoxically sterile fertility clinic where she embarks on a program of intensely targeted CBT, brutal aversion therapy, and a relentless cocktail of mind-shifting meds. Ella’s life will never be the same again as she is pulled from the shores of sanity by the vigorous undercurrents of madness and paranoia.

Writer/director Alexis Jacknow‘s panic attack of a film takes the decent into madness template and crams it full of ideas and energy. From the grim opening to the astonishing climax Clock is an engrossing ride that veers spectacularly from schlocky exploitation to fiercely astute social commentary. At times, it feels like the ideal companion to Samuel Fuller’s insane Shock Corridor.

Jacknow takes great care to give her protagonist real depth and relatability. Played with a perfect mix of vulnerability and durability by the excellent Dianna Agron, Ella is a woman of deep complexity whose jeopardy stems from a mixed-up desire to please. Her pragmatic worldview, fractured belief system, and solid sense of purpose make for a loaded launchpad from which to send her spinning out of control.

Ella does not think the world is a fit place to bring a child into and what’s more, believes that anyone who does “isn’t paying attention“. Ella interprets her Jewish faith through the generational prism of survivor’s guilt and embraces its superstitious standpoint that the universe knows when you are happy and hates it. Ella adores her job and the kudos it brings her.

All these aspects of her personality are up for manipulation and erasure as soon as she enters the mysterious fertility clinic and especially when she begins to ingest the unspecified pharmaceuticals.

This 10-day reboot of Ella’s motherly instincts forms the core of Clock and the painful invasive process is both horrible and fascinating to witness. In portraying perfectly reasonable thought processes as treatable chemical imbalances similar to depression, the film finds fresh perspectives on tired tropes. Subjects such as secrecy as a defense mechanism, primary tokophobia (the fear of childbirth in those who have never been pregnant), and the struggles surrounding nonconformism are arbitrarily whitewashed in the quest to foster broodiness.

Nasty sensory desensitisation tanks, bizarre Rorschach tests, and ultimately sinister body implants are used to bombard Ella’s resistance to motherhood until she is a pliable Freudian slip of the woman she once was. As the drugs kick in so does the surreal imagery as Clock shifts cogs into full-blooded horror mode.

Upon her release, Ella is given the contradictory instruction of no sex for 3 weeks and the film moves into a new phase as the true cost of her “treatment” is revealed. This segment of the film is both breakneck and heartbreaking as her world disintegrates around her.

Epic hot flushes, medically induced colour blindness, and sexy time with cold eggs are the least of Ella’s worries as she melts down and scatterguns social awkwardness. One such incident is so uncomfortably gross that even the most hardcore horror fans will be minded to clutch their pearls.

Despite its clear leanings toward intellectualism the beauty of Clock is that it never forgets to be a fucked up horror flick. All the requisite elements are present and correct. The intrusive sound design and foreboding score are both on point. Plain light-of-day psychodrama from the Sam Raimi school of scares bleeds into some genuine rectum-clenching jump scares. There are twisted motifs aplenty, an impossibly tall screaming specter, and of course, graphic genital harm and much more to enjoy.

As the movie barrels toward its conclusion, there are a couple of solid twists to savour that add elegantly arranged layers to the narrative without derailing the world-building and confusing the plot. Indeed the climax itself begins with a gorgeously executed reveal that will drop jaws. It’s an audacious ambush that will have you reevaluating cinema’s power to mesmerise.

Clock feels like something of a world premier coup for Overlook Film Festival. I was reminded of when I first experienced Julia Ducournau‘s irrepressible Raw. However, Jacknow seems able to do what her peers such as Eggers, both Cronenberg’s, and Aronofsky, all superb filmmakers, can’t. That is to tell a highly intelligent and psychologically challenging story without bending to the seductive lure of pretension. Instead, she strips it away and allows her work to breathe.

As a result, her accomplished debut feature is a full-bodied blend of whip-smart writing, creative confidence, and ballsy B-movie theatrics that hits the sweet spot between thought-provoking cinema and entertaining thrills.