Goody Goody Review

 Short enough that you don’t feel cheated by a confounding ending.

There are more than a couple of ‘pregnancy horror movies,’ and I’ve even watched another one recently on Shudder, but here’s Goody Goody, which does something a little different.

Most of the film plays out in real time, and with a brisk 80-ish-minute runtime, it’s set in the middle of nowhere as Goody attempts to give birth. There’s a little bit of a short flashback. The title card actually comes about twenty minutes later, but from then on we’re just with the birth.

This is at least a different approach to other, similar films, where we see the build-up to the pregnancy, and the growing dread, or sinister nature of whatever is happening in those films: devils, demons, strange creatures; I’ve seen it all. Goody Goody starts with the pregnancy and gives you a sense that something is going to go weird with it all, which, of course, it does.

Goody (Samantha Robinson), her husband Jason (Colby Hollman), Jason’s sister Candace (Zoe Renee) and midwife Sarah (Colleen Foy) are all you’re getting here. That’s the cast, and it’s a tight one for a small film shot in one location. Even that flashback, I’m not convinced, isn’t filmed in the same home to look like a different one. And the four have a good thing going on; Robinson is doing great work at playing the pregnant wife who, unsurprisingly, has to perform a little weirder… creepier and in quite often agonising pain; the pair of Hollman and Renee give great sibling vibes, and Foy is the one with a heart big enough to want to help here.

Helping someone do something ill-advised is the set-up here; whether that’s the whole point of the film, I’m not sure. Because Goody, as we learn in the flashback, really wants this natural birth. Sarah, who knows what she is talking about, advises wholly against it and basically only agrees to help because she knows Sarah is going to go ahead and do it anyway, presumably, because the internet, maybe TikTok, told her a natural birth in the middle of a forest is a great idea. There’s no chance anything could go wrong, and you may wish you were closer to a hospital.

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