Welcome Home Baby

Judith (Julia Franz Richter, brilliantly channeling Rosemary’s Baby–era Mia Farrow) enjoys a contented existence as a happily coupled, professionally fulfilled ER physician in Berlin when she receives word of her estranged father’s death, and learns that she’s inherited the house he inhabited in the remote Austrian village where she was born. Returning for the first time since childhood, with her partner Ryan in tow, Judith hopes to sell the property quickly, still bearing emotional scars left by the birth family that sent her away with no explanation decades earlier—but she’s startled to find her extended family all too welcoming, entreating the young couple to stay and put down roots in Judith’s ancestral home. It’s not long before she begins to experience strange memory lapses, troubled dreams, and troubling visions—and disturbing signs of a possible pregnancy, unplanned and unexplained. Building and sustaining tension with the sure hand of a veteran storyteller, director Andreas Prochaska masterfully updates the well-worn tropes of prenatal anxiety horror to wrestle with a uniquely millennial ambivalence around family legacies, prospective parenthood, and ties that bind so tightly that they just might draw blood.