‘Clock’ Review: That Biological Ticking Is Now a Time Bomb

Ella (Dianna Agron) has a profitable profession as an inside designer, with spare time for afternoon intercourse together with her good-looking, loving husband (Jay Ali) and volunteer work. The solely cloud over this good image is that Ella doesn’t need youngsters, and feels unhealthy about not feeling unhealthy about it.

Motherhood has lengthy been a significant topic of horror motion pictures, which have feasted on such themes as intimate invasion — the decision got here from contained in the womb! — and perception-distorting imbalances. The writer-director Alexis Jacknow incorporates these and extra, messily so, in her Hulu characteristic “Clock.”

Unmoored by conflicting impulses and needs, Ella lastly provides in, largely to appease her widowed father (Saul Rubinek), a Holocaust survivor who begs her to maintain their household line alive. She enrolls in an experimental program that feels as if Goop had been dreamed up by David Cronenberg and is run by the alarmingly soothing Dr. Simmons (Melora Hardin). The remedy to make her extra receptive to having youngsters entails speak remedy, medicine and a mysterious intrauterine implant.

Agron, contemporary from a powerful flip within the indie “Acidman,” anchors “Clock” with a restrained, histrionics-free efficiency considerably at odds with the movie’s perfunctory leap scares. “Clock” is a psychological thriller, or even perhaps a satire, in horror clothes, tantalizing us with thought-provoking concepts, solely to desert them: nature versus nurture, the affect of the wellness-industrial complicated over minds and our bodies, the oppressive expectations positioned on girls — together with by themselves. Most dramatically potent is the connection between Ella and her father, fraught with guilt. Alas, time runs out on that one, too.

Clock
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Hulu.