Joey
Officially hitting Tubi is the new psychological thriller Bed Rest from director Lori Evans Taylor.
What happens when you’re confined to a single room with only your thoughts and memories to comfort you? The new psychological thriller Bed Rest by director Lori Evans Taylor looks at a woman who is confined to bed rest and forced to relive her traumatic past. Will facing her demons prove to be too much for her?
If you want to learn even more about Bed Rest check out our interview.
Bed Rest Official Synopsis: After years of struggling to start a family, Julie Rivers (Melissa Barrera) is pregnant again and moving into a new home with her husband as they embrace a fresh start. Upon being ordered to mandatory bed rest, Julie begins to slowly unravel as she suffers through the monotony and anxiety of her new constraints. Soon, terrifying ghostly experiences in the home begin to close in on Julie, stirring up her past demons and causing others to question her mental stability. Trapped and forced to face her past and the supernatural, Julie fights to protect herself and her unborn baby.
Bed Rest follows the story of Julie and Daniel as they are renovating their new home. As is the case with most old homes, this one is plagued with numerous problems, including excessive water damage in one of the upstairs bathrooms.
It isn’t long after moving in that Julie begins to experience paranormal activity within the home, including hearing audible child’s laughter coming from inside the bathroom.
That very same night, Julie and Daniel go out to a party where the couple get into an argument after Daniel fails to mention that Julie had been pregnant once before but that the child had died during birth.
After suffering a serious fall, Julie is rushed to the hospital where she is told that she suffered a partial placental abruption and, as a result, she must now remain under bed rest for the duration of her pregnancy.
Upon returning home, Julie is forced to halt all renovations on their new home and avoid any kind of stress as it could endanger her child and retrigger the mental dissociation she experienced from her last pregnancy.
It’s here in Bed Rest where the film starts to lay down the foundation that Julie has a history of mental illness.
Right from the start, it’s evident that Julie’s bed rest is going to be anything but relaxing when, on the first day, she hears strange noises coming from inside the bedroom closet, and she even catches a glimpse of what she believes to be someone hiding in there.
It only gets worse from here as Julie’s mental stability continues to wane, causing her to believe that a small child is lurking within her home.
Worried about his wife’s safety, Daniel hires Delmy, a healthcare aid, to assist Julie during her bed rest.
Following an incident, Julie’s doctor arrives and Julie reveals that she has been seeing a five-year-old boy that she believes to be the spirit of her son at the age he would have been if he had survived.
Julie agrees to take medication to avoid being sent to a mental health facility. The medication appears to work for a while but it isn’t long until the young boy reappears, this time with an ominous warning that someone is coming for her unborn child.
Julie soon learns of a local woman who, while pregnant with her fourth child, was involved in a car accident that took the life of her unborn daughter. Unable to deal with the loss, the woman took her own life, but not before she took the lives of her three children.
After doing some research, Julie discovers that the woman killed her three sons in the very same house that Julie now calls home.
Could the spirit of the young boy Julie keeps seeing be trying to warn her that this woman is coming after her unborn daughter? The daughter she never had?
Or is Julie simply losing her mind? Seeing things that don’t exist?
Bed Rest is your basic psychological thriller where you, as the audience member, are tasked with determining if what your primary protagonist is seeing is real or if their psyche is working against them.
It uses the formula we have seen before of the narrator who cries wolf, only to continually have everybody disbelieve her throughout the entire film as they are never present to see any of the paranormal activity.
Where Bed Rest slightly detours from this formula is that you are presented with a character who has a history of mental illness and has made the same outlandish claims in the past. This adds to the skepticism the viewer may have in their narrator. It’s hard to believe somebody who is unreliable.
Bed Rest also differs in that it initially plays into our sense of superiority; it allows us to think that we have discovered the plot twist early on in the movie. By doing so, it succeeds in lulling us into a false sense of security, believing that we discovered the twist before the big reveal, only to later completely pull the rug out from underneath us and discredit what we believed to be true.
It manages to pull this off by utilizing its unreliable narrator. We think that, just because the narrator believes things to be true, so should we.
Bed Rest is able to pull this same trick off a couple of times in the film but, eventually, it gets to the point where it must reveal too much of its hand; all good things must eventually come to an end.
The film delivers an exposition dump and, from there, it’s easy to start putting the pieces together before the final reveal. It even attempts to give you one final twist in the closing moments, but unlike its previous attempts, you can see this one coming from a mile away.
The first two acts of the film are more about trying to reveal the truth behind what is happening to Julie and determining if what is happening is actually happening. This results in these first two acts being more about building suspense than delivering any horror elements, although the film utilizes snippets of horror to help build suspense at times. It isn’t until the final act, as all is revealed, that the film switches from a whodunit to a horror film.
If you’re going into Bed Rest expecting it to be scary, then you’re in for a rude awaking. The horror story primarily takes a back seat in this one, as the majority of the film focuses more on the psychological impact being isolated and forced to deal with past trauma can have on an individual.
Rather than monsters, it’s more about grief and the monster that grief can turn you into.
The overall message also feels like it’s about healing from trauma and how, if you hang onto your past, you stop yourself from being able to move on with your life. In order to grow you have to let go of the past.
Bed Rest is written and directed by Lori Evans Taylor and stars Melissa Barrera as Julie Rivers, Guy Burnet as Daniel Rivers, Erik Athavale as Dr. Meadows, Paul Essiembre as Dean Whittier, Edie Inksetter as Delmy Walker, Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez as Four Year Old Kinsey, and Kristen Sawatzky as Melandra Kinsey.
Bed Rest is currently available on Tubi.
Find out more about Bed Rest in the Bed Rest Tubi Interview.
