“Beldham: an old woman; a witch.”
That’s how The Beldham introduces itself—with a title card defining its monster before we’ve even met our protagonist. It’s a promise of folklore horror, of witches and curses and generational evil. What writer-director Angela Gulner delivers instead is something far more complicated, intimate, and polarizing: a postpartum psychological thriller disguised as a haunted house movie, where the real horror isn’t supernatural at all.
With an 82% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes but wildly divided audience reactions—some calling it “one of the creepiest indie horror releases this year” while others couldn’t even make it past 24 minutes—The Beldham is the definition of a bait-and-switch. It’s marketed like a scary witch movie. It’s actually a deeply personal drama about motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma that just happens to have a crow-like creature lurking in the walls.
Whether you’ll love or hate this film depends entirely on what you’re expecting. If you want jump scares and supernatural terror, you’ll be furious. If you’re open to a slow-burn psychological drama about the horror of losing your mind while no one believes you’re in danger, you might find something genuinely special.
I fell somewhere in between—impressed by the ambition and emotional weight, frustrated by the glacial pacing and deliberately obtuse storytelling. This is confident indie filmmaking with genuine craft, anchored by a phenomenal Katie Parker performance. It’s also a movie that tests patience, wallows in ambiguity, and ultimately reveals itself as something completely different from what its marketing promised.
Let’s unpack what works, what doesn’t, and whether this crow witch is worth your time.
The Setup: Postpartum Hell in Mom’s Creaky House
Harper (Katie Parker) is a struggling new mother who recently experienced a mental health crisis—the film hints she nearly walked into traffic with her infant daughter. Desperate for help and stability, she returns to her childhood home where her mother Sadie (Patricia Heaton) is renovating the old house for sale.
The setup is classic horror: isolated woman, creaky house, mysterious past, concerned loved ones who don’t believe her when she says something’s wrong. But from the opening frames, something feels off about the family dynamics. Sadie’s concern for her daughter borders on controlling. Her boyfriend Frank (Corbin Bernsen) lurks in doorways, quiet and stern. The live-in assistant Bette (Emma Fitzpatrick) tries to help but seems trapped herself.
Then the apparitions begin. Crows—dozens of them—appear to Harper everywhere. On the roof. In the walls. Watching. Nobody else seems to notice or care. Harper sees a horrifying crow-like witch figure stalking the halls. She hears scratching in the walls. She finds mysterious bruises on her body. And most terrifyingly, she’s convinced this presence is after her baby.
But every time she tries to leave, Sadie insists she’s not well enough. Every time she describes what she’s experiencing, she’s told it’s all in her head—residual psychosis from her earlier breakdown. Is Harper being haunted by a generations-old entity that feeds on mothers? Or is she experiencing a complete mental collapse?
The film holds this ambiguity for most of its 85-minute runtime, then delivers a final twist that recontextualizes everything you’ve watched—a twist that will either devastate you or leave you feeling cheated.
What Works: Katie Parker Is Phenomenal
Let’s start with what everyone agrees on: Katie Parker is extraordinary.
A transcendent Katie Parker anchors this entire film, delivering a Herculean performance torn between insanity and desperation. You’ve seen her in Mike Flanagan productions (The Haunting of Hill House), and she brings that same emotional rawness here, amplified by being in virtually every frame.
Parker makes you believe Harper’s terror completely. When she’s convinced the witch is real, you believe she’s being hunted. When doubt creeps in about her sanity, you feel her panic at losing grip on reality. The physical exhaustion of new motherhood, the paranoia of being gaslit, the desperation to protect her child—Parker conveys all of it with devastating specificity.
The film works as well as it does primarily because of her magnetic screen presence. She carries the entire emotional weight, and even when the pacing drags or the plot meanders, Parker keeps you invested in Harper’s struggle.
Multiple reviewers singled her out: “I am a Katie Parker fan. I am a Katie Parker stan. Katie Parker oh my damn… She’s so good. I need her in more movies.”
What Works: The Atmosphere and Sound Design
For a low-budget indie horror film, The Beldham looks and sounds far more expensive than it is. The cinematography captures the claustrophobic decay of the old house beautifully—all creaking wood, dim lighting, and shadows that seem to breathe.
But the real star is the sound design. The constant caws of blackbirds populate the film, akin to whispers in the dark, creating a soundscape of mounting dread. The scratching in the walls, the distant crying, the way silence punctuates moments of terror—it’s genuinely unsettling audio work that keeps you on edge.
Director Angela Gulner, making her feature debut, shows a sturdy feel for pace and tone. She understands that horror is “the internal made external,” using genre conventions to explore psychological and emotional realities rather than just delivering scares.
The creature design for the Beldham itself is wickedly beautiful—maintaining that folky sinister-ness to make it a true threat when it appears. It’s not overused, which makes each appearance feel significant rather than numbing through repetition.
What Works: The Ending Hits Hard (If You’re Patient Enough to Get There)
Without spoiling specifics, The Beldham‘s final reveal is a gut-punch of emotional weight that recontextualizes the entire film. The ending left me in awe, replaying the entire thing in my head and seeing all of the poignant plot points in an entirely new light.
Two twists confront us: one which is, sadly, telegraphed from quite far away; the other a wrecking ball of astounding emotional weight. For viewers willing to sit through the ambiguous, slow-burn journey, the payoff delivers themes about inherited trauma, the uncommon joy and pain of motherhood, and how intrinsically mothers and daughters are connected across generations.
The film’s affecting emotional beats easily paper over its more well-trodden territory. It’s a clever piece of writing whose ending recontextualizes the whole film in a magnetic flash—making you want to immediately rewatch it knowing what you now know.
Heaven of Horror captured it perfectly: “For the longest time, I believed Angela Gulner had made a very decent and entertaining horror movie. Then came the ending of the movie, and I found myself realizing it was much more than that.”
What Doesn’t Work: It’s So. Damn. Slow.
Here’s where opinions sharply divide: The Beldham is painfully, glacially, frustratingly slow.
At 85 minutes, the movie isn’t objectively long. But it feels long. The narrative is just a bit too slow paced and uneventful. The pacing is so sluggish that one screening group—a 200+ person weekly Amazon Prime horror watch party—voted to turn it off after only 24 minutes, something they’d only done once before in their history.
The problem isn’t that it’s a slow burn—it’s that much of the middle section spins its wheels, repeating similar beats without advancing the plot meaningfully. Harper sees something scary. Harper tries to tell someone. Harper isn’t believed. Repeat. Repeat again.
For audiences expecting traditional horror pacing with escalating scares and tension, this will feel interminable. Even patient viewers noted: “For a while I struggled to fully understand what was going on,” and “It starts strong and gets more and more frustrating and surreal as it goes.”
What Doesn’t Work: The Horror Isn’t Actually That Scary
If you’re watching The Beldham hoping to be genuinely frightened, prepare for disappointment. The film fumbles in its use of horror trappings—relying on tired clichés like characters pulled suddenly by invisible forces, mysterious bruises, and ghastly figures appearing unexpectedly.
The Beldham is more chilling and emotional than outright scary. It’s marketed like a horror film, but it’s really a drama. If you judge it solely on the basis of “Is it scary?” you’ll probably be disappointed.
One frustrated IMDB reviewer complained: “Terribly executed scenes, bad script. Bad acting. Horrible plot. It’s funnier than scary.” Another noted: “What breaks suspense/horror movies for me is ‘stupidity’ as well as ‘unnatural communication’. Both are tropes of such movies.”
The horror elements feel obligatory—boxes checked to qualify the film as genre entertainment when the story Gulner really wants to tell is an intimate family drama about postpartum mental health and mother-daughter trauma. Using supernatural elements to explore those themes is valid, but viewers expecting genuine scares will feel cheated.
What Doesn’t Work: Patricia Heaton’s Inexpressive Performance
This is controversial because Patricia Heaton is a three-time Emmy winner with proven dramatic chops. But in The Beldham, her performance is strangely flat and disconnected.
The film works because of Parker, but, perhaps ironically, the most famous person in this bunch nearly sinks it. Heaton is so inexpressive and asleep that it is difficult to identify with her character’s struggle, which is a real problem considering some of the turns in the third act.
Multiple reviewers noted this disconnect: “Even Patricia Heaton is really bad here. Her performance feels flat and unconvincing, adding to the movie’s overall lifelessness.”
To be fair, Sadie is written as emotionally withholding and passive-aggressive, so some stiffness makes sense for the character. But there’s a difference between playing cold and delivering a cold performance. Heaton’s work here lacks the nuance needed to make Sadie’s complexity land—you can’t tell if she’s genuinely concerned or hiding something sinister, and not in an intentional, interesting way.
What Doesn’t Work: Characters Make Infuriating Decisions
Horror requires characters to make some questionable choices to keep the plot moving. But The Beldham pushes this past believability into pure frustration territory.
Harper’s inability to communicate her feelings and experiences clearly becomes maddening. She sees terrifying things but articulates them in the vaguest possible way. When people don’t believe her, she doesn’t provide specific details or evidence—she just repeats that “something’s wrong” without giving anyone a reason to take her seriously.
Especially the protagonist seems absolutely incompetent when it comes to communicating her feelings. This breaks the tension because you’re less scared for her and more annoyed by her.
The other characters—Sadie, Frank, Bette—all behave in ways that feel designed to prolong Harper’s isolation rather than how people would naturally respond. It’s the classic horror movie problem: everyone’s acting dumb because the plot requires it.
The Divided Audience: Drama Lovers vs. Horror Fans
The 82% critics score versus deeply mixed audience reactions tells the complete story. Critics appreciate The Beldham as an ambitious indie drama that uses horror aesthetics to explore postpartum mental health. General audiences who came for witch scares feel misled and bored.
The “It’s Brilliant” Camp
Reviewers who loved it praised:
- Katie Parker’s phenomenal, career-best performance
- Emotional gut-punch ending that elevates everything
- Confident direction and atmosphere from first-time filmmaker
- Genuine surprises in narrative turns
- Themes of motherhood, aging, and intergenerational trauma
- Strong feminist perspective on maternal isolation
Screen Rant called it “both terrifying and deeply moving,” while Morbidly Beautiful awarded 3.5/5 stars: “You don’t have to be a mother to appreciate The Beldham in all its gut-wrenching glory, but it certainly helps.”
The “It’s Terrible” Camp
Viewers who hated it cited:
- Excruciatingly slow pacing
- Barely any actual scares or horror
- Frustrating characters making dumb decisions
- Bait-and-switch marketing (promised horror, delivered drama)
- Boring and uneventful plot
- Pretentious ending that thinks it’s deeper than it is
One brutal review: “Ignore the high ratings—The Beldham is one of the most disappointing horror films I’ve seen in a long time.”
Another: “It’s a grandiose, overblown premise that asks for A LOT of patience from its audience, and for a payoff which doesn’t answer most of the questions posed by the film.”
The “Yellow Wallpaper” Comparison
For literary horror fans, The Beldham draws heavy inspiration from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”—about a woman suffering postpartum depression diagnosed as hysteria, isolated in a room where she slowly loses her grip on reality.
If you love that story’s blend of psychological horror and feminist commentary on how women’s mental health is dismissed and pathologized, you’ll find The Beldham fascinating. If you’ve never read “The Yellow Wallpaper” and just want a scary witch movie, you’ll be confused and disappointed.
Who Should Watch The Beldham?
Watch The Beldham if you:
- Love slow-burn psychological horror over jump scares
- Are interested in postpartum mental health themes
- Appreciate atmospheric indie horror with strong performances
- Enjoyed films like The Babadook or Relic (grief/motherhood horror)
- Can appreciate drama that uses horror aesthetics
- Want to see Katie Parker’s phenomenal work
- Don’t mind ambiguous narratives that prioritize mood over plot
- Are mothers (especially new mothers) who can relate to the themes
Skip it if you:
- Want traditional scary horror with witches and scares
- Get frustrated by glacially slow pacing
- Need your horror to make logical sense
- Hate characters who can’t communicate clearly
- Feel misled by genre bait-and-switch marketing
- Prefer straightforward plots over ambiguous metaphors
- Can’t sit through 85 minutes of repetitive beats for emotional payoff
Content Warning: This film deals with postpartum mental health, infant endangerment, themes of losing your mind, gaslighting, and generational trauma. While not graphically violent, it’s psychologically heavy.
The Final Verdict: Respectable Ambition, Frustrating Execution
The Beldham is the quintessential “your mileage may vary” indie horror film. Angela Gulner’s feature debut shows genuine filmmaking craft, strong thematic ambitions, and confidence in telling a deeply personal story about maternal fear and mental illness through a genre lens.
Katie Parker delivers work that deserves far more recognition, carrying the entire emotional weight on her shoulders with devastating effectiveness. The atmosphere and sound design punch above the film’s modest budget. And for viewers patient enough to reach it, the ending delivers genuine emotional impact that reframes everything that came before.
But the film is also frustratingly slow, relies too heavily on tired horror clichés it doesn’t actually commit to, features characters who behave more like plot devices than people, and fundamentally misleads audiences about what kind of movie they’re watching.
This isn’t a horror film. It’s a drama about postpartum mental health and mother-daughter trauma that wears horror costumes. If you can accept that going in—if you’re willing to sit through long stretches of ambiguous psychological distress for emotional payoff rather than scares—you might find something special.
But if you’re here because the poster shows a creepy witch and you want to be frightened, you will absolutely feel cheated.
Personally? I respect what Gulner accomplished here more than I enjoyed watching it. The ending genuinely moved me, and Parker’s performance haunts me days later. But I also checked my watch multiple times during the sluggish middle section and found myself wishing the film had either committed fully to being a horror movie or dropped the pretense entirely and made a straight drama.
The Beldham is a bait-and-switch—but for some viewers, what’s beneath the bait is far more interesting than what was promised.
What works: Katie Parker’s phenomenal performance, strong atmospheric sound design, emotional gut-punch ending, confident first-time direction, genuine thematic depth about motherhood and mental health
What doesn’t work: Glacially slow pacing, barely scary despite horror marketing, frustrating character decisions, Patricia Heaton’s flat performance, repetitive middle section
Bottom line: An ambitious indie drama wearing horror’s clothes. Katie Parker is extraordinary, the ending hits hard, but the glacial pacing and bait-and-switch marketing will frustrate as many viewers as it captivates. Know what you’re getting into: this is psychological drama, not scary witch horror.
Rating: 4/5
You can watch on:
- Amazon
- Paramount+