Push: Comes to Shove, Then Takes a Long Pregnant Pause
By Thom Ernst
Rating: C
Three films into their partnership, filmmakers — and by all accounts, good buddies — David Charbonier and Justin Douglas Powell offer up Push, a film that plays more like a creative collision than a collaboration.
Their previous films, The Djin and The Boy Behind the Door, were promising genre entries: well-crafted, atmospheric, and aware of their limitations. Push, however, feels like it’s pushing to do everything except get on with the story.
At heart, Push is a home invasion/haunted house hybrid, stitched together with scraps from more interesting films — Inside, Barbarian, and, for those willing to throw their horror memories back a few decades, some foggy remnants of 1980s Hammer productions. The kind where women in flowing nightgowns carry candelabras and explore catacombs with no more urgency than they would if they were making their way to the kitchen for a late-night snack.
Alicia Sanz stars as Natalie, eight months pregnant, recently widowed — or whatever you’re called when your fiancé dies — and determined to assert her independence by taking on a notoriously unsellable real estate gig.
She leaves Barcelona for the state of Michigan to sell a comically oversized mansion that’s been sitting on the market for years due to a past, but apparently not well-publicized, tragedy. Eventually, a vague revelation is offered but delivered in such a throwaway manner that you wonder why it was mentioned in the first place.
The mansion, despite its history, is suspiciously well-maintained and comes fully furnished, including a clean, fully stocked utensil drawer. The clean-up crew on this crime scene deserve special commendation.
From the moment Natalie steps into the house, the film slows to a crawl. And then it just sits there. Push doesn’t merely take its time. It lingers, loiters, and eventually seems to forget what it was doing in the first place. The audience is left to languish in endless tracking shots of stairwells, doors, light switches, and wallpaper.
Natalie has staged an open house, but nobody shows. So, Natalie wanders. And we wander with her. Through room after room. Past window after window. Until whatever tension is meant to be building merely thins out like watered-down soup.
There is the occasional attempt at a jump scare: a sudden burst of birds taking flight, or the jarring ring of a very loud telephone. But mostly, we’re being prepped. Something’s going to happen. Something intense. Something terrifying. Any minute now. Wait for it…
When the intruder finally shows up — Raúl Castillo as the shadowy figure known only as The Client — the film shifts gears. Or it attempts to. Castillo stays mostly in shadow, which isn’t surprising since every man who appears in this film is framed like a noir villain.
The second half becomes a cat-and-mouse chase: pregnant Natalie vs. mysterious stalker. Except she’s not just pregnant. She’s in labour. And somehow, Natalie still manages to outrun him.
Push jumps time in both directions so often that it’s hard not to believe that Charbonier and Powell aren’t pushing us into full-blown metaphor territory.
And then there are hints of the supernatural creeping in, along with a few red herrings, because why not? If the film can’t commit to clarity, it may as well flirt with the possibility of something supernatural. But none of it amounts to much.
By the third act, the movie is sprinting, but the story is still lost in the maze of its own setup. You get the feeling something important is being said, but that somehow you missed the beginning of the conversation.
To their credit, both Sanz and Castillo deliver what’s required: menace, vulnerability, and a dash of panic. And once the film shakes off its lethargic trance and remembers that this is, after all, a thriller, the direction picks up.
Still, you walk away wondering if the filmmakers were holding out for a big twist, or if they simply forgot to write one. Push feels like a long joke waiting for a punchline that never lands. Or worse, one that makes you feel stupid for not getting it, even though the setup was never quite clear to begin with.
Push. Directed and written by David Charbonier and Justin Douglas Powell. Starring Alicia Sanz and Raul Castillo. Begins streaming July 11 on Shudder.