Truly horrifying movies rarely come along. Genre fans usually settle for films that are shocking, or gory, or filled with loud jump scares or creepily atmospheric. But the holy grail is a film that leaves you shaken, that gets under your skin and finds the most primal fears and brings them, anxiously, to the surface. A film that forces you to laugh to break the tension, that makes you squirm in your seat, that makes you confront fears you didn't even know you had. A film that leaves you shaken as you walk out of the theater, and also proud that you made it all the way through the ordeal. A truly horrifying movie.

Grace is a truly horrifying movie.

Writer/director Paul Solet makes his feature debut with the story of Madeline, a woman who loses both her husband and her about to be born baby in a car crash. She decides to keep the dead baby to term for the next three weeks and to deliver naturally, but moments after being born the very dead baby is suddenly very alive. Raising her miracle baby alone, Madeline soon discovers that her child, Grace, has a strange problem with flies in her room, and a stink that can't be washed off. And just when things seem pretty creepy, it turns out that little Grace has no interest in the milk in Madeline's breast but rather the blood in her veins.

Solet slowly ratchets up the horror and disquiet even before the dead baby is born. Madeline is a vegan, and she watches PETA-like videos of animal slaughter that sent ripples of sheer disgust through the audience. But these aren't gratutious scenes of blood-letting; an alternate title for this film could have been Feeding, as the movie keeps coming to the concepts of feeding and being fed upon, both as elements of horror and personal completion. But once that baby is born and the extent of its... situation becomes obvious to us and Madeline, the film reaches new levels of sheer of uncomfortable disgust and terror.

Grace is a body horror film the likes of which we haven't seen since the heyday of Cronenberg. The baby as parasite is one of the many deep-seated fears that Solet exploits, and scenes familiar to all parents - being rundown and exhausted due to the demands of the new baby - take on shades of absolute horror here. And if the gory, ghoulish relationship between mother and infant isn't enough to get under your skin, Solet throws in a mother-in-law with a lactation issue and a doctor with a creepy agenda, as well as a stalking midwife. All of these elements collide in the third act, which features some unsuccessful moments but recovers for a finale that I never saw coming and which made the entire theater explode with queasiness and shock. Two MALE theatergoers fainted at Grace's premiere; at first I thought this was standard PR bullshit, but after seeing the movie I get it. And they didn't faint because the movie is gross (although it can be) but because of the way the grue is presented - you feel every drop of blood, every rip of flesh.

Solet's work on the film is extraordinary. While obviously low budget in some places, the tight, smart script and assured, atmospheric direction keeps you from focusing on the fraying at the edges. A CGI fly becomes less distracting and plain horrifying when it goes up baby Grace's nose, for instance. Jordan Ladd's performance as Madeline is another factor that buoys the film far beyond its low-budget roots.

I'm not a parent but was still viscerally affected by what I saw on screen. I sat next to Drew McWeeny, now of Hitfix.com and father of two, and saw that the film punches parents even more deeply. But with spawn or without, Grace is a reason for horror fans to celebrate. Here's an original film that's not referencing a thousand other movies, that doesn't shy away from being truly disturbing, that isn't afraid to be smart and build characters before getting to the real horror elements, and that just fucking WORKS. Like this movie or not, I dare you to sit through it and not be affected. Hell, I dare even the most jaded genre fan to sit through this one without being truly horrified. And maybe even fainting.

9 out of 10