Parents' Guide to Clock

This concept thriller aims for some visual scares as well as deeper unsettling messages, but it falls a little flat on both fronts. Clock's best asset is lead Dianna Agron of Glee fame, who manages to stay genuine in the dramatic role despite some over-the-top dialogue and character actions. The central idea of the pressure on women to conceive is an interesting starting point. But the supposed clinical trial Ella participates in is so far-fetched, and her motivation too rushed, for much believability. Without a plausible story to latch on to, the film's draw is solely the scares, and those are few and far between. Several border on campy, purposefully or not.

Writer-director Jacknow makes the connection through Agron's Ella about the societal pressure on women of a certain age to give up their own pursuits in order to have children and the pressure families can additionally apply for daughters to carry on lineages. In this case, Jacknow has used a Jewish family with close experience of the Holocaust to add morbid weight to her father's insistence on her filial duty. A photo of a relative released from the camps at a mere 80 pounds has a connection to a frightening hallucination Ella repeatedly suffers. These parallels can feel a little gratuitous, particularly one conversation about the Holocaust in which Ella ethnocentrically suggests that people consider it the evilest genocide because its victims were wealthy, modern, and educated.