The Beldham hides a secret, which the audience and new mother Harper are attempting to uncover.
The latest psychological horror had its North American premiere on Friday at the Austin Film Festival. The maternal horror centres on Harper (Katie Parker of Halt and Catch Fire), who is struggling to protect her newborn kid from the Beldham, a birdlike monster who sucks babies’ breath. However, the Beldham’s black wings and cloak conceal a secret, the kind that, when exposed, causes the audience to reevaluate every scene, every interaction that has preceded it – and that is exactly the reaction that writer/director Angela Gulner intends to provoke.
The shift in viewpoint creates an uneasy atmosphere at The Beldham, as if Harper is living in a separate reality than her mother, Sadie (Patricia Heaton, Everybody Loves Raymond), and housekeeper Bette (Emma Fitzpatrick, The Collection). Heaton confessed that she was initially confused by the apparent split. “When I originally read the script, I thought, ‘This writer doesn’t understand how a mother would react to her daughter. “I don’t understand it.” However, as the twist was revealed, “I said, ‘Oh, OK, now I get it.'” And then I said, ‘This is really cool.'” What she saw now was not only a picture with extraordinary psychological dimensions in its narrative, but also an acting challenge. “We had this discussion about which reality to shoot in for each scene with each character.”
Parker faced more than one unexpected acting obstacle, as she shared multiple scenes with the film’s most unusual co-star, Goose, a trained raven who proved to be an excellent scene partner. “I loved him,” Parker confessed. “His trainers said, ‘If he flies back and lands on your arm, he knows you’re safe and we’re just pretending.'” I said, ‘That’s absurd.’ But he knew.”
The acting tasks were equalled by Gulner’s literary challenge, which involved coming up with The Beldham’s ending first and then working backwards to make it work. She composed the parts of Harper and Bette expressly for Parker and Fitzpatrick and continued to send them revisions. She went on: “I don’t know how many scripts Katie and Emma and [producer Mark Meir] read …”
“You need to see the film at least twice and then you can really appreciate the craftsmanship.””45,” Parker deadpanned.
“I just waited for the last one,” Fitzpatrick said dryly, emphasising that it was worth the wait. “You need to see the film at least twice and then you can really appreciate the craftsmanship.”
“She wrote it to double the revenue,” Parker said, grinning.
Fitzpatrick laughed. “Yeah, you really need to see it twice …”
“And then everything falls into place,” Heaton explained.
However, including that ambiguity into the screenplay was not an easy feat. The trick, according to Gulner, “was to not make [Harper] into an unreliable narrator, and we have to know that what we’re seeing is her experience, but we also have to know that something is wrong.” She credited the flexibility of the performers, editor Dashiell Reinhardt’s acute eye, and Meir’s counsel for determining the best take to explain the script’s dual-edged emotions. In one episode, Harper gives Sadie a particularly harsh rebuke. “Her world just kind of crumbles in her eyes for a moment, and originally we had [Heaton] say the line back, and we kind of went, ‘Oh, we don’t need that, and now it just lives in this liminal space because her face acting is so good.'”
“You’re saying you cut my queue?” Heaton pretended to be a diva.
Heaton, who has won an Emmy, is changing genres. Despite being a self-proclaimed horror enthusiast, she has never directed a horror film before. However, this is not her first encounter with the supernatural; she also voiced the Lunch Lady Ghost in Danny Phantom. She laughs at the memory, not least because she admitted to imitating her Everybody Loves Raymond co-star and comedy classic Georgia Engel’s voice “when she’s the sweet lunch lady before she turns into a monster.”
However, Eaton got to her first horror role in an unusual method. In 2023, she produced Unexpected, a film directed by her husband, David Hunt, and shot in Oklahoma. Randy Wayne, the film’s unit production manager, sent her the script for The Beldham. After hitting “that sweet spot” in the writing, she was ready to return to Oklahoma and collaborate with Wayne. However, it was a unique opportunity to work on a film that featured women not only as actors but also as department leaders. “I thought it’d be fun to be with a lot of women and experience how it feels. … It’s not better than having a man in command, but it’s different, with a gentler, more reassuring spirit.”
This gender ratio was not an accident, but rather a purposeful decision by Gulner. She went on: “I knew that in order to grow into this kind of leadership that I needed to feel safe with collaborators, so I wanted to surround myself with that energy.” She remembered how, after one particularly difficult day of filming, she received an unexpected text from Heaton assuring her that she was doing an excellent job. “It made me feel immediately safe and disarmed and supported, and not that an Emmy-award-winning actor wouldn’t do the same thing …”
“Probably not,” said Heaton, Fitzpatrick, and Parker.
“I think there’s just an unspoken thing we all know,” Heather Heaton said. “It’s not like we’re all victims, but it’s just a club, and I’ve been there, and I know that, and I know that it’s gonna be OK.”
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