There is no better time for Clock to come out. With government officials threatening and, in some cases, successfully repressing women’s bodily anatomy, a horror about a woman pressured into being a mother could not be more relevant.

Directed and written by Alexis Jacknow, Clock follows Ella (Dianna Agron), a successful interior designer who is happily married and content with her childless life. However, her friends, who have chosen to have children, belittle Ella and her reasons for not having kids, and her Jewish father, Joseph (Saul Rubinek), begs her to continue the family lineage. Society and religion collide, sending Ella into a state of unrest and paranoia. Is she wrong? The audience knows that Ella is not wrong, but she gives into the pressure of her friends, her father, and society and enrolls in a cutting-edge new clinical trial to restore what she believes is her dormant desire to be a mother.
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This film has a compelling and impactful backstory for why Ella is pressured. Society assumes that a career woman is negligent and selfish for rejecting motherhood. As a Jewish woman, she is made to feel obligated to pass down the faith as Judaism is matrilineal. In addition, Ella’s father impresses upon her the importance of honoring the lives lost during the Holocaust. The script offers an authentic look at the many stressors in a woman’s life when it comes to procreation, and Jacknow excels at conveying how particular these issues are to our protagonist. This messaging is made more poignant with the casting of Dianna Agron and Saul Rubinek, who are both Jewish, and the latter the son of Holocaust survivors. Their performances carry the weight of the narrative and are deeply felt.

Clock is a fascinating horror that has all the elements typical of the genre, but the jump scares and hallucinations are not nearly as terrifying as the grating sounds of nagging from her supposed friends and the pseudoscience nonsense that drives the work of Dr. Elizabeth Simmons (Melora Hardin). Ella vocalizes the many reasons a woman may not want to bring a child into the world, but the most remarkable scene is her explaining how honoring Holocaust survivors through childbearing has less to do with them and more with the fear of it happening again. And with the rise of xenophobia and public officials outright communicating anti-Jewish sentiments on public platforms, Ella’s anxieties are being realized in real-time. Clock is a work of fiction heightened by the psychological and body horror with a heavy dose of reality.

Despite having a well-defined conceit, the film struggles with defining Ella. In more ways than one, she is a hollow avatar for the average working woman who has found success and fulfillment outside of children. She is hardly shown to have any connections outside the toxic ones, and her happy marriage is only seen through moments of stress and anxiety. We aren’t given the time to sit in the happy moments. The undeveloped character work makes it hard to root for Ella, but Jacknow’s writing is effective in unearthing the absurdity and the horror that surrounds a woman’s womb, which in turn makes Ella relatable.

Agron does well here, with an empathetic performance that endears us to Ella in ways the script does not. She, Rubinek and Hardin are reliable in their respective roles, but there is hardly enough done to flesh out Ella’s world. Jacknow delivers the gory flashes of body horror one would expect, with a few unexpected twists, and the psychological turmoil is competently displayed. However, we lack the gravity surrounding Ella’s choices and their effect on her. Since she is hardly a fully realized person, the consequences of this trial aren’t felt. With that missing emotional core, Clock fumbles.

Clock showcases that Jacknow is a talent to watch in horror, though the film doesn’t stick the landing. Occasionally, the concept is stretched too thin, especially when the character work is lacking. However, Jacknow successfully pulls us into a stress-inducing situation. With such impressive thematic work in Clock, the writer-director will undoubtedly improve on anchoring her stories to characters that resonate because of their development and not just the ideas that make up the character. Despite Ella being rather hollow, there is enough in the script to get the audience hooked on her story and empathize with her plight. Jacknow understands that when reality informs horror, it becomes much more terrifying.

Clock begins streaming on Hulu Friday, April 28. It is 91 minutes long and is not yet rated.