‘The Beldham’ Review: Surprisingly Scary Hidden Gem Tackles Parental Horror
A beldham (or beldam) is a folkloric creature that usually appears as an old woman or crone, often with birdlike features. In other words, yes — it’s basically another kind of witch, just with a better name. It’s a strong creature to build a movie around.
But the deeper you get into The Beldham, the new film from writer/director Angela Gulner, the more you realize the monster is only the entry point: a clever horror hook on which to hang a very human story. This is a film far more interested in how a family can haunt itself than in the creature lurking in the walls. Intimate, tense, and beautifully paced despite a few stumbles, The Beldham uses its domestic drama to intensify its horror rather than overshadow it.
The film opens with a homecoming — though not a particularly cheerful one. New mother Harper (Katie Parker) arrives at the sprawling country house owned by her own mother, Sadie (Patricia Heaton), bringing her baby, Christine, in tow. Sadie is newly retired, spending more time with her boyfriend Frank (Corbin Bernsen), and trying to sell the aging property. Harper is ostensibly there to help clean and prep the house for buyers, but she’s also recovering from an accident that’s left her shaken and hesitant.
Almost immediately, things feel off. Sadie has hired a sort of all-purpose housekeeper and aide, Bette (Emma Fitzpatrick), who Harper suspects is actually there to monitor her. Sadie is thrilled to have Harper home, but she’s tense and withdrawn, and not only because the house won’t sell. Birds keep finding their way inside. Unexplained noises rattle the walls. And Harper quickly develops the unnerving sense that the house — or something inside it — wants to harm her daughter.
Harper becomes convinced a supernatural threat is closing in, while Sadie believes something much different. She hasn’t brought Harper home simply to spend time together; she’s trying to keep her daughter from slipping into dangerous, impulsive behavior she’s displayed before. As Harper fights what she believes is a literal monster, Sadie fights for control over her household — and her adult child.
There’s a natural tension that comes from multiple generations of parents inhabiting the same space. Not necessarily negative, but heavy — a mix of expectation, fear, and the desperate hope that the people we love will understand us. The Beldham’s sharp script zooms in on that anxiety and magnifies it through the slow intrusion of a dark presence in the home.
As a haunted-house story and a tale of fraught motherhood, The Beldham wisely resists overusing its creature. Gulner is patient with her scares, delivering them at exactly the right moments and letting the tension breathe in between. Even mundane scenes — like a bowl of soup at dinner — feel charged with unease. The film isn’t jump-scare scary, but it is deeply, consistently unsettling. The pacing does wobble in the middle, where it feels like the film is stalling just a bit before its third-act reveal, but overall the tone and atmosphere are impressively assured.
A lot of that strength comes from the three women at the film’s center. Heaton, known primarily for sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond and The Middle, once again proves she has far more range than people tend to remember. Her ability to pivot emotionally on a dime — honed by years of comedy timing — serves her beautifully here as she shifts Sadie from brittle to furious to vulnerable in seconds.
But even Heaton can’t eclipse Parker, who delivers a raw, nervy performance that never loses sight of Harper’s warmth. She’s exhausted, on edge, and constantly bracing for impact, yet Parker grounds her with a lived-in humanity that keeps us invested even when the script hits a few bumps. Together, the two lead performances create a sharp, prickly mother-daughter dynamic, with Fitzpatrick’s gentle Bette caught between them. Their chemistry is so strong that you could imagine The Beldham working just as well as a stripped-down stage play.
The Beldham joins a lineage of parental horror stretching from Don’t Look Now and The Exorcist to The Babadook and, more recently, Relic. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of those films, but it’s a worthy addition. Smart, tense, and confidently executed, it delivers its late-game twists with clarity and lingers with surprising staying power. Quietly, it’s one of this year’s creepiest indie horror releases — and it deserves to find the wide audience that will appreciate its carefully orchestrated dread.
The Beldham is now available on digital VOD platforms.
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The Beldham
Summary
This is quietly one of the creepiest indie horror releases this year, and I hope it finds a wide audience who can get lost in its well-orchestrated dread.
Categorized: Reviews
