There’s a secret at the heart of The Beldham – and the audience and new mother Harper are the ones trying to figure it out.
The new psychological horror received its North American premiere on Friday at the Austin Film Festival. The maternal horror focuses on Harper (played by Halt and Catch Fire’s Katie Parker), who is fighting to save her newborn child from the Beldham, a birdlike figure who steals the breath from babies. Yet the black wings and black cloak of the Beldham hide a secret, the kind that, once revealed, makes the viewer reconsider every scene, every interaction, that’s gone before – and that’s exactly the response that writer/director Angela Gulner wants to elicit.
The split in perspective gives The Beldham a sense of unease, as if Harper is in a different reality to her mother, Sadie (Patricia Heaton, Everybody Loves Raymond), and home help Bette (Emma Fitzpatrick, The Collection). Heaton admitted that she was initially thrown off by that seeming divide. “When I first read the script, I was thinking, ‘This writer has no idea how a mother would respond to her daughter. I don’t get it.’” However, once the twist revealed itself, “I went, ‘Oh, OK, now I get it.’ And then I went, ‘This is so cool.’” What she saw now was not just a film with unusual psychological levels to the writing, but an acting challenge. “We had this discussion about which reality to shoot in for each scene with each character.”
That wasn’t the only unusual acting challenge Parker faced, as she shared several scenes with the film’s most unusual costar: a trained raven called Goose, who turned out to be a great scene partner. “I loved him,” Parker said. “His trainers were like, ‘If he flies back and lands on your arm, he knows you’re safe and he knows we’re pretending.’ I was like, ‘That’s insane.’ But he knew.”
The acting challenges were equaled by the writing challenge Gulner set for herself when she came up with The Beldham’s ending first and then worked backwards to make it work. She wrote the parts of Harper and Bette specifically for Parker and Fitzpatrick, and kept sending them drafts. She said, “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.”
“I just waited for the last one,” Fitzpatrick added dryly, but emphasized 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,” grinned Parker.
Fitzptatrick laughed. “Yeah, you really need to see it twice …”
“And then everything falls into place,” added Heaton.
However, building that ambiguity into the script was not a simple task. The challenge, Gulner said, “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 performances, the keen eye of editor Dashiell Reinhardt, and Meir’s advice, for finding the right take to inform the dual-edged emotions of the script. There’s one scene in which Harper delivers a particularly brutal rebuke to Sadie. “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 line?” Heaton faux-diva’d.
It’s a change of genre for the Emmy-winning Heaton. Even though she’s a self-declared horror fan, she’s never made a horror film before. However, this isn’t her first brush with the uncanny – having been the original voice of the Lunch Lady Ghost in Danny Phantom. She cracks up at the memory, not least because she admitted to emulating her Everybody Loves Raymond costar and sitcom legend Georgia Engel for the voice “when she’s the sweet lunch lady before she turns into a monster.” </p
However, Eaton came to her first horror part in a roundabout way. In 2023, she was a producer on Unexpected, a film directed by her husband, David Hunt, which shot in Oklahoma. That film’s unit production manager, Randy Wayne, sent her the script for The Beldham. After she hit “that sweet spot” in the script, she was ready to head back to Oklahoma and work with Wayne. However, it was also a rare opportunity to work on a film that was not only led by women in the acting roles, but also as department heads. “I thought, this’ll be fun, to be with a lot of women and see what that feel like. … It’s not better than if a man’s in charge, but it’s different, and it’s just a softer, more comforting kind of energy.”
This gender ration was no accident, but a deliberate decision by Gulner. She said, “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 recalled after one particularly brutal day of filming that, out of the blue, she got a text from Heaton telling her that she was going a great 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,” chorused Heaton, Fitzpatrick, and Parker.
“I think there’s just an unspoken thing we all know,” said Heaton. “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.”
The Beldham
D: Angela Gulner
USA, 85 min., North American Premiere
Tues., Oct. 29, 5:30pm, Galaxy Highland
Catch up with all of The Austin Chronicle‘s Austin Film Festival coverage.
This article appears in October 25 • 2024.