The Ones Below

“You don’t deserve that thing inside you!” It may be said in the bit­ter blind­ness of grief, but this line from The Ones Below, addressed to preg­nant Kate (Clémence Poésy) by her neigh­bour Tere­sa Bak­er (Lau­ra Birn), cuts to the very heart of Kate’s anx­i­eties about maternity.

A trou­bled fam­i­ly his­to­ry and a dif­fi­cult rela­tion­ship with her own moth­er (Deb­o­rah Find­lay) have meant that Kate has tak­en 10 years even to con­sid­er hav­ing a baby with hus­band Justin (Stephen Camp­bell Moore). With per­fect tim­ing, the sim­i­lar­ly preg­nant Tere­sa and her con­trol­ling, clean freak old­er hus­band Jon (David Mor­ris­sey) move into the vacant apart­ment down­stairs. Kate imme­di­ate­ly warms to Teresa’s devot­ed enthu­si­asm – con­trast­ing with Kate’s own hes­i­tan­cy – for bring­ing a baby into the world.

“It’s not that it’s ugly,” Kate com­ments on the Bak­ers’ new­ly, too- neat­ly man­i­cured back lawn, ​“It’s just that it’s real­ly deter­mined to be a gar­den.” This deter­mi­na­tion extends to Jon and Theresa’s life-mis­sion of cre­at­ing their own pic­ture-per­fect nuclear family.

When a trag­ic acci­dent takes that pos­si­bil­i­ty away, the vac­u­um is filled with a tox­ic mix of recrim­i­na­tion, envy and cov­etous­ness in which their deter­mi­na­tion will trans­gress all neigh­bourly bound­aries. For amid all the usu­al stress­es and pres­sures of being a par­ent, Kate is also grow­ing con­vinced that the Bak­ers have sin­is­ter designs on her new­born – sus­pi­cions which seem con­firmed by shots, at least some objec­tive, of Teresa’s furtive activ­i­ties while babysitting.

A tale of two flats, of two preg­nan­cies and of two colours (mut­ed blues for the Pol­lards, alarm­ing cit­ron yel­lows for the Bak­ers), The Ones Below estab­lish­es a dra­mat­ic upstairs/​downstairs clash of styles and out­looks, before mov­ing into thrilling, claus­tro­pho­bic spaces. The plot ges­tates taut­ly, before the truth, no less har­row­ing for being expect­ed, comes out.