Breeder: Review

10th January 2022

Mia Lindberg (Sarah Hjort Ditlevsen) and her husband, Thomas (Anders Heinrichsen) are trying for a baby, but they are having trouble conceiving and Thomas is starting to lose interest because he blames himself for their infertility.

They live a charmed life though as Thomas is partners with Isabel Ruben (Signe Egholm Olsen), a brilliant neurobiologist who has seemingly unlocked the gene for eternal youth. Over the course of a few treatments, Dr Ruben can reverse the aging process, but there’s one catch. It only works for men.

However, Mia is soon to learn that her husband’s work comes with a price as their neighbour, Nika (Eeva Putro) turns up battered and bruised and wearing a hospital gown claiming that she’s been tortured by somebody known as ‘the dog’. Thomas immediately puts Nika in his car and heads to the hospital whilst Mia stays at home and tries to find out what’s going on.

Unfortunately, Thomas never gets to the hospital and when Mia tries to find out where he went, she discovers the awful truth behind Dr Ruben’s research.

Breeder is a torture porn horror movie directed by Jens Dahl. The set up for the drama seems to be something different that may want to say something about the way women are treated in horror, how they’re expected to be wives and mothers and how the world only sees them as baby makers. Instead, Breeder’s drawn out first thirty minutes only seem to be there to fill time. What the audience then gets is the same kind of torture porn from films such as Saw and Hostel, but when the latter has better social commentary then you know you’re in trouble.

Women are often the victims in horror movies and in the 21^st century filmmakers are addressing this issue or at least commenting on it whilst doing the very same thing. It’s unfortunate then that director Dahl doesn’t seem to have got this message because the whole movie feels like a misogynist’s wet dream even when it’s trying to say that it’s not.

Female empowerment still has a long way to go when it comes to horror and cinema in general and Breeder seems to set it back a few decades.

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