Baby Mine

Director Ross Partridge dips his toe into the world of folk horror with his original thriller Birthrite

- TARA BENNETT

MIX A PREGNANCY STORY WITH a creepy home in the middle of nowhere, and the horror practically writes itself. Actor and director Ross Partridge tells Red Alert he felt the same way when he asked to read actor Patch Darragh's (Succession) first original screenplay, centred on a pregnant couple who relocate from the city to the country to live in the home bequeathed to them by a deceased aunt.

“My wife and I, Jennifer Lafleur [Nope], were developing another idea for a while about past lives,” Partridge says. “But there was something about this script that just resonated to me about the place we were all at postCovid, and thinking about our rights and giving up so much ownership of all of our freedoms. It was a well-concocted genre movie that had some themes in it that I was like, ‘They're a little obtuse, but I am really intrigued by it.”

In early 2023, they did some rewrites on the script which became what is now Birthrite, and Partridge decided it would be his next directorial effort, following his well-received 2015 feature directorial debut Lamb. Aware that the WGA and SAG strikes were looming, they spent most of March into April developing the script and then pulled the trigger to try and complete production on the film before the strikes began that summer.